How industries are solving challenges using Ansible.
Before knowing how industries are solving challenges using Ansible . We should know what are the….
Challenges for Change and Configuration Management.
1. Flexibility
How to maintain flexibility enabling a swift response to ever-changing market dynamics? You might need to sway outside of set IT management processes and workflows taking shortcuts to accelerate changes while you still must stay in control
2. Visibility
It is tremendously difficult to analyze the overwhelming amount of configuration information separating the critical from the non critical to make sense of it all, and present it in a format that is precise and actionable. Essentially, how do you build IT analytics taking in account highly detailed change and configuration information?
3. Multiple Environments
Multiple IT environments typically server different teams and might be managed by different groups. How then do you track and maintain consistency of changes across the highly disparate Development, Testing, Staging, Production and Disaster Recovery environments?
4. Change Validation
What is requested to be changed might be described, but what actually comprises the change typically is not captured (files to be touched, parameters to be updated). How do you validate then that a request for change was properly fulfilled?
5. The Impact of Granular Change
The impact of changes is assessed at high level as a part of change review and approval process. Affected configuration items and their dependencies are explored. Change schedule is assessed versus other planned activities. However no one looks into actual impact of detailed changes. What could happen if a specific configuration parameter is changed?
6. Outsourcing
Using multiple vendors in different locations across time zones makes it extremely difficult to manage change. Not only you have multiple hands touching environments, there could be certain communication and practices gap between the involved parties
7. Technology Mash
Organizations typically mix system components and software infrastructure elements developed in-house, provided by external vendors and customized and out-of-the-box systems. The level of knowledge and control varies between these types of the systems while these elements could be highly interdependent
8. Agile Development
An agile change and configuration management process is required to support agile development. The pace of changes increases drastically. There are various solutions that support continuous integration in such environment as manual methods can’t survive the pace. Similar approach is needed to support continuous change and configuration management.
9. People
Organizations build tremendous amounts of operational knowledge. However most of it is kept in the heads of the IT specialists that have a tendency to change jobs from time to time. People across IT operations need to be able to understand and analyze changes that are planned and that just happened at least at a basic level independently of availability of individual IT specialists.
10. Data/Information Integration and Benchmarking
Today various IT operations team use different tools and methods to administer and manage environment silos they are responsible for. How to integrate all this dispersed configuration data in order to scale your ability for analysis and empower IT Ops to make optimal business decisions. How do you ensure that the configuration changes you make are the right ones? How do you ensure the change is good for the business and that it will remain stable.
To face this challenges for Change and Configuration Management and many more Ansible is one of the tool mostly used by many companies for the purpose of Configuration Management.
What is ansible ?
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning , configuration management , application deployement , intraservice orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.
It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.
What problems does tool like Ansible solve ?
They solve the problem of setting up and administrating servers, especially setups that need to scale.
Imagine you have a reasonable number of servers, all possibly with different setups, maybe some are webservers, some fileservers, some database servers etc.
Then suppose you need to suddenly update all those servers with a change, or set up a new addition and make sure its a consistent and guaranteed setup like the other servers. Ansible will go a long way towards this ,doesnot needing a client app installed on the server. Ansible is slightly different it just needs SSH access and it will do any setups via that and SSH commands.
So simply, remote automation of servers.
How industries are solving challenges using Ansible.
Many industries have come to rely on RedHat for their IT infrastructure. With Ansible, we can supercharge our Red Hat deployment, bringing Ansible’s simple IT automation to all aspects of business. Whether it’s hooking into Red Hat Satellite to provision and configure our systems with Ansible, using Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower to deploy our applications to OpenShift, or using Ansible’s simple automation to deploy, manage, and upgrade your OpenStack cloud, Ansible and Tower work seamlessly in a Red Hat Enterprise environment to streamline your IT operations and cut your IT costs.
Management/Satellite
- Deploy Satellite agents to servers
- Unify post-build systems management
- Manage server channel subscriptions
- Ease migration between Satellite infrastructures
- Unify disparate update and management infrastructures
Management/Insights
- Automated remediation, enabling users to automatically remediate Insights findings
- Deploy Insights in highly-scalable, secure manner
- Streamline large and small deployments of Insights client
Management/Cloudforms
- Existing system and environment integration
- Ongoing updating and management of environment and systems
- Complex multi-tiered deployments
Middleware/JBoss
- Deploy JBOSS products across disparate infrastructures
- Centrally manage JBOSS configurations
- Discover JBOSS versions and reconcile subscriptions
Infrastructure /RHEL
- Existing environment baselining and management
- System deployment, configuration, and management
- Orchestrate complex environment standups
- Unify the management of multiple major and minor releases
- Discover Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) versions and reconcile subscriptions
Cloud /Openshift
- Manage software development lifecycle for applications deployed into OpenShift
- Deploy applications into OpenShift
- Deploy and manage OpenShift in an on-prem environment
- Scale OpenShift instances at need
Cloud /Openstack
- Deploy OpenStack infrastructure
- Deploy and manage OpenStack instances
Cloud /RHV
- Deploy and manage RHV infrastructure
- Deploy and manage RHV instances
- Perform rolling upgrades
- Ease disaster recovery configuration and management
Storage /Ceph
- Deploy and manage Ceph environments
- Scale Ceph components
These are some of the ways industries uses ansible for integration with RedHat product .There are more ways industries use to integrate with different technology.
Ansible business benefits
- Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.
- Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
- Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
- Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
- Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
- Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.
Why one should Learn Ansible ?
I would like to start by saying that the World has changed from what is was about 10–15 years ago. In terms of technology, the ideation to release gap has now become a matter of days. In short, any new technology will become redundant in a matter of days.
Having said that, Ansible is an Infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tool. This would mean, you can use Ansible in multiple cases. Two of the most common being :
Create new environments and manage their configs.
Manage existing servers.
This opens up a world of possibilities. There would be enterprises who require atleast one of the above services and watching the market trends, Ansible does look like the preferred choice. The agentless approach, easy to maintain YAML format code, etc have made it a no brainier when it comes to deciding between the multiple options for Infra provision and config management.
Another trend which is catching on is containerisation. Many organisations now prefer to have their test / prod environments as containers. Most of the clients I have seen prefer a combination of Ansible, Docker and Docker swarm or Ansible, Docker and Kubernetes. As convenient as containers are, they are amazingly powerful with a tool like Ansible.
From the above two observations and general trends of the IT market at the moment, I would say that Ansible is here to stay and investing time in learning Ansible would be great!
At the end of the day, I would suggest, be very good with your basics. Whether you use Ansible or Docker or any of the trending software stacks. Tools like Ansible, Docker etc would only be extremely powerful in the hands of someone with solid skills in the above mentioned sections! Happy coding!
Thank You .
