How Ansible is solving the industry challenges…
Tags: Ansible

Today we are going to discuss about a very demanding topic and yes it is automation. rather than jumping directly to the topic lets understand what is Automation and why everyone is demanding it so much.

So, To know why Automation is so important, let’s consider one real life example.

Consider you are a carpenter and you created a beautiful flower pot. after you went to market and showed it to customer and in just a 10 minutes its attracted so many people that you got a huge orders for it.

now think how much tedious task it will be if you do every bit of flower pot with your hand, is it easy ?

No, right. that’s where the term automation will help you. you simply focus on creating one machine that will help you to make a basic flower pot structure so that you can focus on the designing part only. so, lets move to the technical definition of automation…

What’s automation?

Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks with reduced human assistance. Any industry that encounters repetitive tasks can use automation, but automation is more prevalent in the industries of manufacturing, robotics, and automotive, as well as in the world of technology in IT systems and business decision software.

Why automate?

Automation helps businesses on their path to digital transformation. Organizations today are dealing with major disruption — think Airbnb, Amazon, etc. They’re challenged with supporting their employees and partners, reaching new customers, and providing new, innovative products and services faster.

They want and need to be the ones disrupting their own industries.

Automation is critical to managing, changing, and adapting not only your IT infrastructure, but the way your business operates through its processes. By simplifying change through automation, you gain the time and energy to focus on innovation. The automated enterprise’s goal is to get work done faster. This frees up IT staff to focus on bigger issues, resolving them, and — in turn — making them routine and eligible for automation.

There are multiple tools in the market to automate the things depending on your requirement like testing or deployment or configuration.

Here I am talking only about the Configuration management tool i.e. Ansible Automation Tool.

Ansible :

In the need of an hour, Ansible came to the aid of entire IT and DevOps team in terms of scaling automation, managing complex deployments and enhancing productivity.

Ansible is an agent-less software platform that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. It can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. The platform includes all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation.

Why Ansible Solutions?

Ansible portrays a wide range of features that can enhance current processes, migrate applications for better optimization, and provide a single language for DevOps practices across the organization.

Centralized Infrastructure

With Ansible, you can centrally govern and monitor disparate systems and workloads. Through Ansible Tower you control infrastructure, access a visual dashboard, and complete job scheduling and inventory management.

Easy Deployment

Ansible requires no additional agents or security infrastructure and can be used for multi-tiered deployments as efficiently as possible. It is one of the simplest IT automation technology in the industry.

Plain Language

Ansible uses a very simple YAML language that allows the user to automate in a language that approaches plain English.

Effortless App Deployment and Upgrades

Ansible enables you to easily deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently from a single framework. The Ansible playbook system helps you in controlling installations, upgrades, and regular management.

Efficient Architecture

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required. Typically you’ll work with your favorite terminal program, a text editor, and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.

Positive Impacts of Ansible:

The following are the advantages you can leverage by using Ansible consulting services.

Enhances speed: With Ansible you can provision systems and deploy workloads at a faster pace.

Increases Responsiveness: Ansible can scale readily in pace with demand.

Reduces Manual Errors: It drastically reduces the risk of human error by automatic the processes.

Fortifies Collaboration: It Breaks down the silos and creates a culture of automation by continuously aligning business and IT.

Case study :

AMELCO: CONTINUOUS DELIVERY USING ANSIBLE TOWER

Amelco is a UK-based company specializing in the development of software solutions and products for the betting industry and wider financial markets. Amelco offers a range of trading platforms and services, including unique mobile betting services, data exchange integration, live monitoring applications and a host of trading tools. Learn more at www.amelco.co.uk

INDUSTRY : Financial Services

BUSINESS ISSUE : Simplify Application Deployment, Minimize Downtime.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE : Amelco is a producer of cutting-edge technology solutions for the betting industry and wider financial markets. Based on a multi-tiered architecture running on VMware, customers can mix and match the financial betting or trading modules that best suit their business model. With over 400 VMware nodes operating on Linux-based Ubuntu, each customized for its extensive customer base, deploying applications quickly and efficiently across these different environments proved a challenge. Having very defined customer service level agreements (SLAs), Amelco specifically sought a solution that would also minimize downtime.

SOLUTION : Leverage Ansible’s agentless automation framework to simplify the process of deploying, operating and upgrading applications — across disparate environments, in one simple language.

RESULTS : Using Ansible and Ansible Tower to automate application deployment, Amelco is able to reduce complexity, speed solution delivery and ensure continuous delivery. Ansible solution benefits: • Adoption took a day or less, not weeks. An upside benefit that could be quickly passed on to customers • Faster time to deployment for its bespoke and modular client solutions, resulting in speedier time to market and higher customer satisfaction • A simplified and repeatable deployment process, leveraging true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration that minimized the complex dependencies of heterogeneous environments • Ansible Tower functionality created self-service IT, offering a better utilization of team resources • Powerful automation capabilities ensure continuous delivery, reducing downtime and ensuring performance against SLAs

Ruan Transportation Case Study

What was Ruan’s business challenge?

Configuration management : Ruan runs a VMware-centric infrastructure consisting of Windows and Linux. We’re looking for a method to standardize our current Linux boxes, and potential future Linux boxes.

How is Ruan using Ansible?

While we’re early in our deployments, we have our Op playbooks done — start/stop/ restart OTM, scripts to synchronize the web servers, etc. Our goal is to use Tower’s RBAC to delegate these tasks to the operations and business teams, and our current task is writing some documents for these teams before we roll Tower out more widely. We’d also like to move to a more DevOps approach for some items; we’re approximately 80 percent of the way done in doing playbooks for those items. Long-term, we want to do on-demand scaleout of our OTM infrastructure. Currently it’s a multi-hour process across all three layers. We’re working on playbooks to improve this process.

Conclusion :

On a final note, we can conclude that Ansible provides a simple and powerful package for configuration management and automation. However, Ansible is new to the market now and has to deal with competition from renowned sources. The limited amount of documentation related to Ansible can create formidable setbacks for learning Ansible.

On the other hand, the growing interest in Ansible due to the adoption of Ansible by renowned agencies such as NASA can also turn the tables. The diverse functionalities of Ansible, such as provisioning, orchestration, application deployment, and security and compliance, show its potential. These capabilities of Ansible can translate effectively into a comprehensive DevOps tool. The future course for Ansible would depend on strengthening the advantages of Ansible while working on the setbacks.

I am writing such many article on the new technologies.

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