How industries are solving challenges using Ansible
By: Ritik Bobade
Tags: Right Mentor, Ansible, Facts, Righteducation, Vimal Daga

1. What is ansible?

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

2.How ansible works?

Ansible simple allow you to automate, configure and deployed by writing code and using their modules which makes ansible intelligent will do you all tasks in one go without all the hassle that we used to face before by all the things manually.

· Playbooks

Playbooks are used to write the code that do your all tasks weather it is automation, configuration or deployment in multiple systems in one go. Playbooks are written in language called YAML and are quite powerful as they plays a crucial role for IT automation in ansible.

· Inventory

Inventory is the location where all node addresses are stored in order to execute tasks at the nodes.

These inventories are very useful as we can classify servers as webserver or database server, etc. Which is found to be very useful while writing playbooks.

3.What makes ansible different from other automation tools present in

the market like Puppet and Chef.

In order to understand the how ansible Is different we will have to

Understand two terminologies:

· Pull configuration: Nodes fetch the information from the server and periodically fetch the configuration.

This is a master slave approach which needs a client installed at the node side in order to control it from the master system. Which ultimately means we have to configure nodes manually.

· Push configuration: Server pushes configuration to the nodes and in order to do this no client needs to be installed at the nodes that means no manually configuring of the nodes.

Ansible uses the second terminology i.e. the push configuration whereas chef and puppet use the pull configuration.

So Ansible just needs to push the configuration to the nodes in order to get work done no need to install a client and configuring it manually that leads to fully automation of tasks.

Now, we know what is ansible what are its use cases why it is different from others in the market now lets looks some of the case studies how big companies have used ansible to solve their major problems and saving a lot of time and human work.

Microsoft

We all know Microsoft the tech giant Microsoft started using ansible a bit ago and as stated by Microsoft after using ansible their network complexity has been increased by 33% and their services had been more efficient and they have added ansible in Azure which is the cloud service provided by Microsoft.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing managing company it provides you with the pushed posts on social media your follower and sentiment analysis .

This company has 16 million users around the globe and booming very rapidly but on major problem arrived as to give their user quality service and and keep scaling they have to always manually set server and setting up so much server manually is not an easily tasks as it takes lot of time and human effort which ultimately lead to more costing.

Then Host suite started using ansible to setup their web and database server and their problem was solve and now they can set 100’s of server in matter of seconds.

Amelco is a UK-based company that develops software solutions for the betting industry and financial betting markets. The business was looking for a way to deploy its applications efficiently across its hundreds of different environments, and it also sought to limit downtime. To do this, Amelco performed an Ansible migration to an agentless automation framework. This reduced the complexities it faced with the deployment, operations and the upgrade of applications over a range of contrasting locations, while also using one simplified language.

In addition, by introducing Ansible and Ansible Tower, Amelco has successfully automated its application deployments. Other benefits include reduced complexity and continuous delivery, along with speed solution delivery.

Further benefits include: