Industry Use Cases solved by Ansible

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

Provisioning :

From traditional bare metal through to serverless or function-as-a-service, automating the provisioning of any infrastructure is the first step in automating the operational life cycle of your applications. Ansible can provision the latest cloud platforms, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices and bare-metal servers.

After bootstrapping, nodes can be connected to storage, added to a load balancer, security patched or any number of other operational tasks by separate teams. In essence Ansible becomes the connecting tool in any of your process pipelines – taking bare infrastructure right through to day to day management, automatically.

Provisioning with Ansible allows you to seamlessly transition into configuration management, orchestration and application deployment using the same simple, human readable, automation language.

Configuration Management :

Ansible is the simplest solution for configuration management available. It's designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers and IT managers.

Ansible requires nothing more than a password or SSH key in order to start managing systems and can start managing them without installing any agent software, avoiding the problem of "managing the management" common in many automation systems.

Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of your infrastructure. New team members will be able to quickly dive in and make an impact. Existing team members can get work done faster - freeing up cycles to attend to more critical and strategic work instead of configuration management.

Application Deployment :

Ansible is the simplest way to deploy applications. It gives the power to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. You can configure needed services as well as push application artifacts from one common system.

Ansible allows you to write 'Playbooks' that are descriptions of the desired state of your systems, which are usually kept in source control. Ansible then does the hard work of getting your systems to that state no matter what state they are currently in. Playbooks make your installations, upgrades and day-to-day management repeatable and reliable.

Playbooks are simple to write and maintain. Most users become productive with Ansible after only a few hours. Ansible uses the same tools you likely already use on a daily basis and playbooks are written in a natural language so they are very easy to evolve and edit.

Continuous Delivery :

Ansible provides true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration. Ansible's push-based architecture allows very fine-grained control over operations, able to orchestrate configuration of servers in batches, all while working with load balancers, monitoring systems, and cloud or web services. Slicing thousands of servers into manageable groups and updating them 100 at a time is incredibly simple, and can be done in a half page of automation content.

Ansible inventory can be easily split to slice your environment up into different groups of machines. You can then easily test your plays with a staging machine and if tests pass, that can then be instantly run against production if you so choose.

Ansible can work with networks, load balancers, monitoring systems, web services and other devices that might need touching during a rolling update. For example, you can add or remove servers from your load balancing pool and disable monitoring alerts for each machine that is being updated.

Security Automation :

The need to respond to security attacks manually is daunting. With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform you can automate and integrate different security solutions that can investigate and respond to threats across the enterprise in a coordinated, unified way using a curated collection of modules, roles and playbooks.

Security teams can configure a sequence of jobs that share inventory, playbooks, or permissions to fully automate investigations or remediations.

Integration with third-party external log aggregation services helps security teams identify trends, analyze infrastructure events, monitor anomalies, and correlate disparate events.

Security teams can use Ansible Tower to manage other enterprise applications—like security orchestration and automated response (SOAR) solutions.

Orchestration :

Deploying a single service on a single machine can be fairly simple and you have lots of solutions to choose from. You can bake all your configuration into a virtual image, or you can run a configuration management tool. But no one deploys a single service on a single machine any more. Today’s IT brings complex deployments and complex challenges. You’ve got to deal with clustered applications, multiple datacenters, public, private and hybrid clouds and applications with complex dependencies. You need a tool that can orchestrate your complex tasks simply. You need Ansible.

There are many different kinds of complex IT orchestrations. Let’s take OpenStack as an example. The OpenStack cloud platform is built on a variety of separate interlocking services - including separate services for storage, networking, identity and more. Each of these services has their own dependencies on other services and other components and each has their own separate configurations and sequences for deployment and upgrading. Attempting to deploy, operate and upgrade an OpenStack cloud can be a complex and daunting task.

That’s why, across the industry, Ansible is used to orchestrate OpenStack rollouts. Companies like Rackspace, CSC, HP, Cisco and IBM rely on Ansible to keep their OpenStack clouds available simply and securely.

Ansible includes hundreds of modules to support a wide variety of IT integrations, including: aws, microsoft azure, GCP, splunk, cisco, windows, vmware etc.,

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