Use-cases of Ansible ?
By: Saini Ganesh
Tags: Openshift, Ansible, Automation

Why ansible ?

Working in IT, you’re likely doing the same tasks over and over. What if you could solve problems once and then automate your solutions going forward? Ansible is here to help.

Ansible is a tool owned by RedHat. Ansible is an infrastructure provisioning and configuration management tool. It provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.

Use-cases of Ansible

Provisioning:

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

2. Configuration management:

Ansible is the simplest solution for configuration management available. Doing something on the top of the operating system is known as configuration management.

3. Application deployment:

Ansible is the simplest way to deploy your applications. It gives you the power to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. Nowadays all the applications are deployed on the top of the OpenShift.

What is OpenShift?

Open shift is a PaaS (platform as a service) product offered by RedHat. It is an application development platform for building container based applications. The OpenShift product is a Kubernetes based container management platform. It is a unified platform.

What OpenShift is doing?

It can do all the things for us in just one go. We only need to provide one github url to the openshift and openshift automatically download the code from the github, then build the image and push to the private repository, then contact the kubernetes for deploying the image in the production environment. Openshift is only meant for managing the containers. Nowadays all the apps are deploying on the top of the containers.

The Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat OpenShift teams have been collaborating to build a new way to package, deploy, and maintain Kubernetes native applications: Ansible Operator.

4. Continuous Delivery:

Continuous delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically prepared for a release to production. Ansible is a powerful tool for IT automation and can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.

5. Security- Compliance:

Ansible allows you to simply define your systems for security. Ansible’s easily understood Playbook syntax allows you to define and secure any part of your system, whether it’s setting firewall rules, locking down users and groups, or applying custom security policies.

6. Orchestration:

Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration helps IT to more easily manage complex tasks and workflows. Ansible orchestration allows you to create and automate a playbook for orchestration.

Advantages of using ansible

Simple

2. Agentless

3. Powerful and flexible

4. Efficient

8,781

Companies using Ansible

How Hootsuite uses Ansible?

Hootsuite is a social media management system used by businesses and organizations. Hootsuite is popular among Fortune 1000 companies.

Problem faced by Hootsuite:

The main challenge facing Hootsuite was the lack of repeatability. This made automating Hootsuite’s infrastructure a challenge, and Hootsuite were also facing difficulties in application deployment.

To resolve this:

Hootsuite introduced Ansible core. This allowed Hootsuite to build servers from scratch and enabled repeatability. In the future, Hootsuite plans to implement an Ansible migration of its app deployment and possibly in ad hoc production server management.

Top industries that uses Ansible:

Looking at Ansible customers by industry, enlyft find that Computer Software (36%) and Information Technology and Services (9%) are the largest segments.

Conclusion:

With today’s demand for automation, consistency and the move towards cloud, companies from all sectors are adopting easy-to-use tools that enable them to achieve these goals and overcome complexities.