How Industries are Solving Challenges Using Ansible!!
What is Ansible…?
Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up DevOps teams for more strategic work and automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Playbook:-In ansible we have to write one playbook and in that playbook, we have to write all the steps which we want to perform like installation, configuration, and many more.
Inventory:-A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “host file”. Inventory can specify information like IP address, for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes
Controller Node:-Any machine with Ansible installed is known as a controller node where we can run Ansible commands and playbooks.
Managed Node:- The devices or we can say that the servers we manage with Ansible are Managed Nodes. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts” and we don’t have to install ansible on managed nodes.
Use Cases:-
1. PROVISIONING:-
If you’re PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower help streamline the process
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT :-
Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform. Your apps have to live somewhere.
APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT :-
When you define your application with Ansible and manage the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams can effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY:-
Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.
SECURITY AUTOMATION :-
When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning, and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.
ORCHESTRATION :-
Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.
Case study of Microsoft :-
Microsoft’s mission is to “empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”.
To support its strategic mission, Microsoft has set a goal of end-to-end digitization. This effort simplifies processes and experiences for end-users across all of its infrastructure teams managing services and applications. As part of this shift, the company is focused on building a culture of success, supported by automation technology.- Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working closely with Red Hat Consulting, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity. DevOps teams across the company are now focusing on sharing knowledge, building skills, and creating innovative technology solutions.
“Digital transformation at Microsoft is about how we’re reinventing our operations and radically improving customer experience by eliminating manual work,” said Ryan Mecca, Principal Software Engineering Group Manager, Engineering Platforms and Data Insights, at Microsoft
Microsoft’s teams established three automation environments:
• Development, where code is developed and tested on a small scale.
• User acceptance testing (UAT), where code is peer-reviewed and tested at scale.
• Production
Engineers now automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks by deploying Ansible Playbooks to the network through a centralized playbook version control system. Additionally, these three environments support a collaborative DevOps approach across the company’s network and engineering teams.
Building a culture of modern development Standardized network automation at scale:-
Microsoft has used its staged Ansible environments to automate routine, time-consuming engineering tasks, such as the delivery of logic-based changes to ensure services are available to customers. Events in the network trigger other workflows, such as advanced telemetry, ticketing, logging, and analytics. Automating also helps the company follow a phased, iterative approach to code creation that protects code quality with scheduled releases of tested, verified network configurations. Standardizing on a user-friendly automation solution has not only helped Microsoft solve complexity by creating a single source of truth for services, dependencies, and integrations, but also made it easier for non-engineers to focus on service creation with peer-reviewed code.
“Digital transformation is really changing the way that we think about how we solve problems. In the past, we had to manually do the same deployment again and again,” said Dworak. “With Ansible, we can create blueprints to deploy it multiple times. And every time we deploy, it’s the same copy. Instead of redoing work and having a lot of different, single-use versions, we can continually finetune this shared code.” This approach creates opportunities for Microsoft to continue scaling to support customer demands at a much faster pace.
Thousands of hours of operational work saved as Implementing Ansible has helped:-
Around thousand of work hours per year wer saved by Microsoft, including several weeks’ worth of work by reducing production downtime and network configuration defects. Completing the code peer reviews and gated check-ins through preproduction environments, the company has reduced the number of defects and bugs introduced into its production environment. This approach ultimately reduces major incidents and outages, improving network quality. Additionally, faster issue resolution means less time is devoted to repetitive support work.We have a process out right now that closes about 97–98% of the tickets that come in via automation.” With the time and money saved by adopting standardized, stable automation, Microsoft’s teams can now focus on creating innovative infrastructure solutions that provide higher service quality to end-users.