LIFESUM’S ANSIBLE AUTOMATION: CASE STUDY
By: Himanshu Yadav
Tags: Ansible, Lifesum, Automation, AWS, Computers

We are currently living in a world where it has become really necessary to have work done without much human resources, i mean that’s why we’re liking robots, isn’t it ? But that’s for labour work. What about computer work? computer work also need as much human resources while managing data and deploying os, servers in thousands of computers in a single company. That’s where automation tools like ansible ,chef comes in. Today we’re talking particularly about ANSIBLE and its use in company.

WHAT IS ANSIBLE ?

Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. It is also used for more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use. It is written in python and works accordingly.

HOW ANSIBLE WORKS ?

In Ansible, there are two categories of computers: the control node and managed nodes. The control node is a computer that runs Ansible. There must be at least one control node. A managed node is any device being managed by the control node.

Ansible works by connecting to nodes on a network, and then sending a small program called an Ansible module to that node. Ansible executes these modules over SSH and removes them when finished. The only requirement for this interaction is that your Ansible control node should have login access to the managed nodes. SSH keys are the most common way to provide access.

HOW “LIFESUM” IS USING ANSIBLE ?

Lifesum is a digital health platform that encourages users to lead a healthier, more balanced lifestyle. Lifesum has proved hugely successful throughout Europe, reaching over 6 million downloads so far. Lifesum’s platform uses a host of applications, in addition to a joint back end API, and it bases its infrastructure on AWS.

Lifesum was looking for a simplified yet robust tool to allow configuration management, application deployment, and server provisioning.

Lifesum started their Ansible migration in 2014. It started implementing Ansible straight away and has used it in several major areas. First, Lifesum used Ansible playbooks “to automatically spin up virtual development machines with Vagrant”.

In the case study, Michal Gasek, SYSOPS Engineer at Lifesum also notes that Lifesum’s goal, “is to ensure that everyone had exactly the same working environment as we deploy our applications regularly. Three months later all our environments, from developer’s laptops to production instances on Amazon are fully Ansible managed.”

Gasek continues, “We use AWS Auto Scaling and pre-bake Amazon AMI images with Ansible provisioning playbooks. When EC2 instances are launched by Auto Scaling, Ansible, triggered by cloud-init, runs provisioning playbooks, once again ensuring up-to-date configuration changes are applied, and pulling the latest applications versions from repositories. Ansible has helped us to automate, significantly simplify and speed up the process of dynamic resources scaling”.

Gasek adds that Ansible stood out because of its ‘power and simplicity’. Gasek also highlights how Ansible has enabled developers to concentrate on building ‘great product features’, rather than solving common problems like inconsistencies and misconfiguration.

That’s it.

Thank You.

Happy learning.

#Task_11.2

References: https://opensource.com/

https://stackshare.io/ansible