Ansible Case Study

Automation plays a huge role in our digital transformation.

Ludovic Hauduc
Corporate Vice President, Core Platform Services, Microsoft

Using Ansible, we’ve been able to cut down certain processes from 17 hours to 3 minutes.

BRANDEN FAULLS

For many years , most system administration and Infrastructure management has relied on manual tasks performed through graphical or command-line user interfaces. This approach is error-prone. It is easy for a system administration to skip a step or perform a step mistakenly.
Furthermore , By managing each server manually and independently can make more difficult and introduce errors into the IT environment.

Automation can help avoid the problems caused by manual system administration and infrastructure management. This builds a foundation to help us follow best practices in DevOps. Developers can define their desired configuration in the automation language.

Automations helps in Mitigating Human Error. Automation allows us to use code review , peer review by multiple subject matter experts, and documentation of the procedure by the automation itself to reduce our operational risks.

What is Ansible ?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure in Ansible Playbooks. It is also an automation engine that runs Ansible Playbooks.

Ansible can manage powerful automation tasks and can adapt to many different workflows and environments.

Ansible is …….

Simple

• Human readable automation
• No special coding skills needed
• Tasks executed in order
• Get productive quickly

Powerful

• App deployment
• Configuration management
• Workflow orchestration
• Orchestrate the app lifecycle

Agentless

• Agentless architecture
• Uses OpenSSH and WinRM
• No agents to exploit or update
• Predictable, reliable and secure

Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. With over 3,550 contributors submitting new modules all the time, rest assured that what you are automating is covered in Ansible already, or will be very soon.

How Ansible Works?

Ansible works by connecting to nodes and pushing out small programs called as ansible modules. Ansible then executes these modules over SSH by default and then remove them when finished.

Ansible management node is the controlling node, which controls the entire execution of the Playbook. It’s the node from which you are running the installation, and the inventory file provides the list of the host where the modules need to be run. The management node makes ssh connection, and then it executes the modules on the host machines and installs the product. It removes the modules once they are installed. So that’s how ansible works.

Communication is the key to DevOps

Unless automation is designed for teams, it’s just another tool. For it to serve people, automation needs to be smarter and simpler.

Simplicity grows more important the more people it impacts. That’s why Ansible is automation designed with everyone in mind.

Ansible: the language of DevOps

Ansible is the first human-readable automation language that can be read and written across IT. No matter what role you have in the organization, or how technical — Ansible gives you a common language to describe your IT infrastructure.

Ansible Use Cases

• Provisioning
• Config Management
• App Development
• Continuous Delivery
• Security & Compliance
• Orchestration

Who Uses Ansible ?

Companies

1530 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks, including LaunchDarkly, Tokopedia, and ViaVarejo.

Top Countries that uses Ansible

Distribution of companies that uses Ansible based on company size

Developers

9184 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Ansible.

How Amelco use Ansible

Amelco is a UK-based company that develops software solutions for the betting industry and financial betting markets. The business was looking for a way to deploy its applications efficiently across its hundreds of different environments, and it also sought to limit downtime. To do this, Amelco performed an Ansible migration to an agentless automation framework. This reduced the complexities it faced with the deployment, operations and the upgrade of applications over a range of contrasting locations, while also using one simplified language.

In addition, by introducing Ansible and Ansible Tower, Amelco has successfully automated its application deployments. Other benefits include reduced complexity and continuous delivery, along with speed solution delivery.

Further benefits include:

• “Faster time to deployment for its bespoke and modular client solutions, resulting in speedier time to market and higher customer satisfaction”.
• “A simplified and repeatable deployment process, leveraging true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration that minimized the complex dependencies of heterogeneous environments,”.

Forrester Wave: Infrastructure automation platforms Q3 2020

In this 26-criterion evaluation of infrastructure automation platform providers, Forrester identified the 13 most significant ones. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps infrastructure and operations professionals select the right one for their needs. Ansible Automation Platform emerged as a leader because of the solution’s integration capabilities and its model editing capabilities.

Conclusion

With today’s demand for automation, consistency and the move towards cloud, companies from all sectors are adopting easy-to-use tools that enable them to achieve these goals and overcome complexities. Ansible migration is the ideal solution for automating organizations’ modern technology challenges, while also performing an essential role in app deployment and improving responsiveness.

Thank You :)