Ansible and today’s World
Go and configure a web server 10 times and sometimes your O.S will be linux and sometimes Ubuntu , go on…
Hold on , I am not giving you some task to do 😊 , but rather confronting you with a fact people usually face .i.e repetition of same things over and over again and the O.S. changes to , so the commands have to change for that reason .
Pretty boring huhhhh….
Won’t it have been easier, if after just writing everything once we can use it nearly everywhere.
Well then let me help and befriend you with Ansible which has helped so many industries including BMW , NASA ,itself in making their and their employees lives much easier.
But before talking about them , Let’s go and give you some idea about this : Ansible
So let’s give some meaning to this term first…
Ansible
Instead of making you bored with the technicality , just take Ansible which helps you automate the tasks that once would take hours of your ( IT admin) valuable life and making it accomplished in few minutes. It’s Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of: time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.
Ansible is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure. It’s easy-to-learn, self-documenting, and doesn’t require a grad-level computer science degree to read. Automation shouldn’t be more complex than the tasks it’s replacing.
It not only saves your time but also eliminate most errors and mistakes and ultimately makes you more productive at your work.
Not only you , it saves your company resources and helps in overcoming complexity and most importantly a ton load of money .
Architecture
Ansible uses inventory files to know which nodes to configure and which to not which is also mentioned in the playbook when executing Ansible codes. You can also use multiple inventory files at the same time and pull inventory from dynamic or cloud sources or different formats (YAML, INI, etc.). Any machine with Ansible utilities installed can leverage a set of files/directories to orchestrate other nodes. The absence of a central-server requirement greatly simplifies disaster-recovery planning
— Ansible uses an agentless architecture, with Ansible software not normally running or even installed on the controlled node. Instead, Ansible orchestrates a node by installing and running modules on the node temporarily via SSH. For the duration of an orchestration task, a process running the module communicates with the controlling machine with a JSON -based protocol via its standard input and output. When Ansible is not managing a node, it does not consume resources on the node because no daemons are executing or software installed which eventually helps in saving a ton of company’s resources.
Playbooks
Playbooks are YAML files that express configurations, deployment, and orchestration in Ansible and allow Ansible to perform operations on managed nodes. Each Playbook maps a group of hosts to a set of roles. Each role is represented by calls to Ansible tasks.
Ansible Tower
Ansible Tower is a rest API, web service, and web-based console designed to make Ansible more usable for IT teams with members of different technical proficiencies and skill sets. It is a hub for automation tasks.
Now let’s see some case study of how Ansible helped these industries in overcoming their challenges.
BMW
CHALLENGE:
BMW a worldwide known automobile giant is focused on automated cars. But for that they require a large stack of driving data which proves their safety. Not only they have to find this driving algorithm ,they also needed to access, analyze, and apply massive quantities of data — and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed. The group wanted to create a high-performance, data-driven development platform as the IT foundation of its autonomous vehicle efforts.
SOLUTION:
Provide machine learning capabilities at massive scale
The BMW Group chose to work with DXC Technology to build a solution for its data and performance challenges. To create a Kubernetes-based platform with robust automation capabilities, DXC Technology deployed DXC Robotic Drive, a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology. This solution helps the BMW Group develop faster with scalable machine learning and big data processing capabilities. The platform was configured and created in just 3 months.
NASA
CHALLENGE:
NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.
SOLUTION:
Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment. .
RESULTS:
As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team.
By the numbers: • Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes.
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes.
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents).
• Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes.
• Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process.
• Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.
TO WRAP UP…
Ansible is a great tool for automation and it has helped way too many folks and saved their time and money .So what are you waiting for come and join and add another page of success story by making Ansible part of your life…
You can also view some of my Ansible use cases in some of my previous blogs links to which are mentioned below.
https://arjunnigam10.medium.com/configuring-hadoop-cluster-using-ansible-playbook-c5bbe0331a87
That was all from my side, hope this was helpful.
Arjun Nigam
Signing off…
