Jun 30, 2021
Ansible : Overview and Case-Study
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. 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 is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates.
Ansible’s main goals are simplicity and ease-of-use. It also has a strong focus on security and reliability, featuring a minimum of moving parts, usage of OpenSSH for transport (with other transports and pull modes as alternatives), and a language that is designed around auditability by humans, even those not familiar with the program. Also, Ansible supports more than 1200 integrations of technologies. Thus enabling, organizations to more options.
Timeline of Ansible:
- The Ansible tool was developed by Michael DeHaan.
- Ansible, Inc. (originally AnsibleWorks, Inc.) was the company founded in 2013 to commercially support and sponsor Ansible.
- Red Hat acquired Ansible in October 2015.
Features of Ansible:
- Free: Ansible is free and an open-source tool.
- Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks
- Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
- Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
- Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.
- Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
Use Case of Ansible
- Provisioning : Helps to automate and manage the process.
- Configuration Management :The enterprise hardware and software information is recorded and updated in detail, thus maintaining the consistency of the product performance.
- Continuous Delivery: Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed and managed throughout their entire lifecycle.
- Application Deployment :The applications can be managed in Ansible from Development to Production when you define and manage the applications using Ansible.
- Orchestration :To manage as a whole and how the configurations interact.
- Security and Compliance :Wide security policy can be deployed across the infrastructure when the policy is defined in Ansible
CaseStudy: NetApp using Ansible
NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Founded in 1992 , NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
NetApp is the data authority for hybrid cloud. The company empowers customers to simplify and integrate data management across cloud and on-premise environments to accelerate digital transformation.
As the world is moving rapidly towards IT Automation to reduce time and human error. NetApp partnered with Ansible to develop a collection of automation and storage configuration management modules to easily provision, deploy and manage NetApp ONTAP, Element and E-Series storage platforms.
NetApp also improved the speed and efficiency of its IT service delivery. The company automated manual, repetitive management processes and streamlined storage provisioning using Red Hat Ansible Automation and RedHat OpenShift.
Solution Benefits:
- NetApp streamlined the iterative configuration file changes required for the NTP project with Ansible Engine, cutting the work from weeks to days.
- Ansible Engine also eliminates the human errors that inevitably occur in highly iterative manual tasks.
- With Ansible customers can automate NetApp solutions to deliver flexible, scalable and highly reliable storage deployment and management solutions for NetApp ONTAP, Element and E-Series storage systems.
- Roll storage-infrastructure configurations into your CI/CD processes and application configurations for maximum agility with over 60 Ansible modules for NetApp.
- Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.
Thanks for reading.
