How Ansible Brings Revolution In IT Industries.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.[2] It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.

Ansible is included as part of the Fedora distribution of Linux, owned by Red Hat, and is also available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Debian, Ubuntu, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux via Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), as well as for other operating systems.

Architecture

Unlike most configuration-management software, Ansible does not require a single controlling machine where orchestration begins.[12] Ansible works against multiple systems in your infrastructure by selecting portions of Ansible’s inventory, stored as edit-able, version-able ASCII text files. Not only is this inventory configurable, but you can also use multiple inventory files at the same time and pull inventory from dynamic or cloud sources or different formats (YAML, INI, etc.). Any machine with Ansible utilities installed can leverage a set of files/directories to orchestrate other nodes. The absence of a central-server requirement greatly simplifies disaster-recovery planning. Nodes are managed by this controlling machine — typically over SSH. The controlling machine describes the location of nodes through its inventory. Sensitive data can be stored in encrypted files using Ansible Vault since 2014.

In contrast with other popular configuration-management software — such as Chef, Puppet, and CFEngine — Ansible uses an agentless architecture, with Ansible software not normally running or even installed on the controlled node. Instead, Ansible orchestrates a node by installing and running modules on the node temporarily via SSH. For the duration of an orchestration task, a process running the module communicates with the controlling machine with a JSON-based protocol via its standard input and output. When Ansible is not managing a node, it does not consume resources on the node because no daemons are executing or software installed.

Design goals

The design goals of Ansible include:]

· Minimal in nature. Management systems should not impose additional dependencies on the environment.

· Consistent. With Ansible one should be able to create consistent environments.

· Secure. Ansible does not deploy agents to nodes. Only OpenSSH and Python are required on the managed nodes.

· Highly reliable. When carefully written, an Ansible playbook can be idempotent, to prevent unexpected side-effects on the managed systems. It is entirely possible to have a poorly written playbook that is not idempotent.

· Minimal learning required. Playbooks use an easy and descriptive language based on YAML and Jinja templates.

THE BASICS: USING ANSIBLE FOR AD HOC PARALLEL TASK EXECUTION

Once you have an instance available, you can talk to it right away, without any additional setup:

ansible all -m ping

ansible foo.example.com -m yum -a “name=httpd state=installed”

Note that we have access to state-based resource modules as well as running raw commands. These modules are extremely easy to write and Ansible ships with a fleet of them so most of your work is already done.

Ansible contains a giant toolbox of built-in modules, well over 750 of them.

PLAYBOOKS: A SIMPLE+POWERFUL AUTOMATION LANGUAGE

Playbooks can finely orchestrate multiple slices of your infrastructure topology, with very detailed control over how many machines to tackle at a time. This is where Ansible starts to get most interesting.

Ansible’s approach to orchestration is one of finely-tuned simplicity, as we believe your automation code should make perfect sense to you years down the road and there should be very little to remember about special syntax or features.

Here’s what a playbook looks like.

— -

- hosts: all

tasks:

-package:

name: httpd

service: started

Which Industries are benefited by using ansible tool and solved their use cases.

1530 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks and Advent One one of them.

Advent One is a leading Australian managed service provider (MSP), specializing in hybrid cloud solutions. It uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate the deployment of new services to its customers. As a result, deployment times have halved and, using Ansible API integration with other third-party applications, new platforms are fully integrated with the business and self-service capabilities are possible.

“Ansible is now at the heart of our hybrid cloud offerings, enabling service automation and integration across multiple third parties to create slick, end-to-end solutions.”

Talor Holloway CTO, Advent One

Benefits

• Reduced deployment times by 50%
• Provided significant support through partner programs and training
• Created automated customer self-service portals

A groundbreaking Australian MSP

Advent One has been operating as an IT service provider in the Australian market for more than 20 years. It solves intricate dilemmas — not only making technology work, but building foundations so its customers can grow in an effective and more secure way. The company specializes in enterprise storage, virtualization, UNIX, IBM-i, Linux®, and Windows. In recent years, it has complemented these foundations with new capabilities to allow cloud migration and to transform the traditional IT landscape for its customers.

Improving capabilities with Ansible

Recently, Advent One quickly configured multifactor authentication for a customer who needed to increase security and decrease risk related to user access. The speed with which Advent One was able to add this capability is a direct result of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Without Ansible Automation Platform, the capability would have taken many days to configure and deploy.

In another recent example, Advent One used Ansible to roll out Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to a fleet of 200 servers for a customer. The company was able to do this quickly and accurately using Ansible Automation Platform.

“Ansible gives us precision when there is no room for error and provides external APIs for other vendors such as ServiceNow so it can integrate seamlessly into enterprise workflows,” continues Holloway. “Just this week, we delivered end-to-end disaster recovery failover and failback in under ten minutes using Ansible. That wouldn’t be possible even with the expensive proprietary tools on the market.”

Supporting customers with speed and self-service

Reduced deployment time

Advent One can now deploy new services and environments in half the time it would usually take. Operational processes have also sped up considerably. That means customers get a better, more responsive service.

“As an MSP, speed, accuracy, and security are critical and Red Hat helps us deliver those to our customers,” said Holloway. “Using Red Hat makes us a much more agile partner for our customers.”

Provided significant support

Advent One developed advanced skills through best-in-class training and is taking advanced Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform training courses, which allow its technical and sales team to scale and deepen their open source skills.

“We participated in a mix of virtual, classroom, and onsite training with Red Hat,” comments Holloway. “It has helped us foster a culture of automation and continuous improvement, which makes bringing our services to market more compelling.”

Created self-service portals

Advent One is providing automated self-service via portals and dashboards using Red Hat technology. This allows its customers to monitor their own systems, request and generate customized reports, and carry out other activities when they need to.

“At one time, we had a ridiculous, laborious process for producing customer reports. By integrating ticket requests, we could automate report generation and make it available via a dashboard at the touch of a button,” said Holloway. “Many bespoke use cases, such as onboarding new users, can also now be done by the customer themselves because we have used the Ansible Tower API to integrate the processes and workflows.”