HOW ANSIBLE HELPS BIG COMPANY

Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment and provisioning. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they have to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency. And Ansible, as noted above, is rapidly rising to the top in the world of automation tools. Let’s look at some of the reasons for Ansible’s popularity.

         Ansible’s main goals are simplicity and ease-of-use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts, usage of OpenSSH for transport (with other transports and pull modes as alternatives), and a language that is designed around auditability by humans–even those not familiar with the program.

           Ansible manages machines in an agent-less manner. There is never a question of how to upgrade remote daemons or the problem of not being able to manage systems because daemons are uninstalled. Because OpenSSH is one of the most peer-reviewed open source components, security exposure is greatly reduced. Ansible is decentralized–it relies on your existing OS credentials to control access to remote machines. If needed, Ansible can easily connect with Kerberos, LDAP, and other centralized authentication management systems.

Ansible concepts

These concepts are common to all uses of Ansible. You need to understand them to use Ansible for any kind of automation. This basic introduction provides the background you need to follow the rest of the User Guide.

1. Control Node
2. Managed Node
3. Inventory
4. Collections
5. Modules
6. Task
7. Playbooks

Control Node

Any machine with Ansible installed. You can run Ansible commands and playbooks by invoking the ansible or ansible-playbook command from any control node. You can use any computer that has a Python installation as a control node - laptops, shared desktops, and servers can all run Ansible. However, you cannot use a Windows machine as a control node. You can have multiple control nodes.

Managed Node

The network devices (and/or servers) you manage with Ansible. Managed nodes are also sometimes called “hosts”. Ansible is not installed on managed nodes.

Inventory

A list of managed nodes. An inventory file is also sometimes called a “hostfile”. Your inventory can specify information like IP address for each managed node. An inventory can also organize managed nodes, creating and nesting groups for easier scaling. 

Collections

Collections are a distribution format for Ansible content that can include playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins.

Modules

The units of code Ansible executes. Each module has a particular use, from administering users on a specific type of database to managing VLAN interfaces on a specific type of network device. You can invoke a single module with a task, or invoke several different modules in a playbook. Starting in Ansible 2.10, modules are grouped in collections.

Tasks

The units of action in Ansible. You can execute a single task once with an ad-hoc command.

Playbooks

Ordered lists of tasks, saved so you can run those tasks in that order repeatedly. Playbooks can include variables as well as tasks. Playbooks are written in YAML and are easy to read, write, share and understand. To learn more about playbooks 

Architecture of Ansible

Advantages of Ansible Infrastructure

• Easy and Understandable: Ansible is very simple and easy to understand and has a very simple syntax that can be used by human-readable data serialization language. It is very good for beginners to understand especially for those who design infrastructure.
• Powerful and Versatile: it is a very powerful and versatile tool that helps in real orchestration and manages the entire application or configuration management environment.
• Efficient: It is very efficient in the sense it can be customized according to your need like modules can be called with the help of a playbook for where the applications are deployed.
• Agentless: Completely independent tool without the use of third-party vendors or agent’s software and agentless.
• Application Deployment: Easy for teams to manage the entire lifecycle from development to deployment.
• Orchestration: ONAP orchestration and all cloud-native platforms very well make use of ansible tool in its use.
• Secured: Security is the key to maintain the ansible infrastructure as all applications require it to get applications free from security breaches.

Some famous usage scenarios of Ansible :

Integration

Infrastructure automation with Ansible Whatever you’re deploying, there’s infrastructure underneath it. Not only does Ansible have great support for automating across the Cloud and across services , but it also supports building your infrastructure from the ground up.

Physical devices

Ansible is simple and powerful, allowing users to easily manage various physical devices - including the provisioning of bare metal servers, network devices or even storage devices. Using Ansible’s Playbook-based automation is easy, and integrates into your current provisioning infrastructure.

• Bare Metal including Cobbler, Stacki and Red Hat Satellite
• Network including Cisco, Juniper, Arista and other.
• Servers including Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Once your physical devices are provisioned, Ansible can then complete the build of your entire stack... almost like magic.

Virtualization

Moved to virtualized infrastructure? No problem. Ansible supports all the industry-leading virtualization platforms, including:

• VMware
• Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
• Xenserver
• Vagrant

With Ansible, you can easily provision, destroy, take inventory, and manage your virtual environments. Plus, Ansible’s extensive support allows you to then deploy and orchestrate across all of your virtual environments once you’ve provisioned them. When you add Red Hat® Ansible® Tower to your environment, non-administrative users can safely request and manage virtual resources using the Playbooks you provide them-- all without needing access to sensitive credentials.

Operating systems

Ansible supports the operating systems that keep your business running, including:

• Linux, including RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, and others.
• Windows and Windows server
• UNIX
• OS X

No matter your platform, Ansible modules exist for managing the installation of software, updates, system configuration, and the managing of system features.

Microsoft To Detail Internal Use of Red Hat Ansible Automation 

Microsoft will be pulling back the curtain later this month on how it uses Red Hat Ansible Automation. Launched in 2013, Red Hat Ansible Automation is a tool for automation across the stack from infrastructure to networks to cloud to security for both IT operations and development.

Microsoft will be one of several Red Hat customers speaking at Ansible Fest Atlanta from Sept. 24 to 26. Other customers talking about their Ansible adoption at the show include Datacom, Energy Market Company and Sure scripts.

Microsoft turned to Ansible to improve the productivity of hundreds of engineers across 600 locations worldwide. Those engineers use Ansible for designing, building and deploying IT networks at scale, and the use of Ansible Automation has saved an estimated 3,000 work hours per year and reduced downtime.

For Microsoft, the Ansible deployment has a dogfooding element and AnsibleFest Atlanta will be an opportunity to drum up more partnership business with joint Red Hat-Microsoft customers. Microsoft Deployment of Red Hat Ansible Automation was done on top of Microsoft Azure.

Ansible and Cisco

As customers embrace the DevOps model to accelerate application deployment and achieve higher efficiency in operating their data centers, the infrastructure needs to change and respond faster than ever to business needs. These changes can help you achieve an agile operational model by improving on automation, innovation, and consistency.

• Integrate your applications into your customer’s existing DevOps tools chain
• Improve flexibility in installing and deploying whatever protocol package or custom applications you need on the switch
• Get open and full access to switch resources and data.

The combined Ansible and Cisco solution provides:

• Speed IT Transformation
• Leverage Open Ecosystem
• Efficient Operational Model
• Faster Adoption
• Improve Speed and Agility

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