INDUSTRIES USE-CASE ON ANSIBLE

ANSIBLE

What is Ansible?

👉Ansible is an automation engine.

👉It allows you to run tasks on multiple server at the same time.

👉It uses the YAML syntax.

Common Use Cases:-

1. Provisioning environments:-

✔Ansible can automate setting up and tearing down environments

✔Specify the desired structure of the environment and ansible will create it

2. Configuring Operations Systems:-

✔Ansible can easily install and remove software while using playbook

✔Ensure services in the desired state whether it is Running or Stopped

✔Apply OS patches

3. Deploying Applications:-

✔Specify the individual tasks required to deploy an application

✔Deploy to multiple hosts / environments

4 .Performing compliance checks:-

✔Create task for the desired sate of a host /service

✔report any changes

“ANSIBLE MODULES ARE IDEMPOENT .For eg -,if one of the tasks is to create a directory on the server, then he directory will be created if and only if it doesn't already exist.”

ANSIBLE INTEGRATIONS

Docker,Amazon,EC2,kubernetes,New Relic, and Microsoft Azure are some of the popular tools that integrate with ansible .9211 developers on stackshare have stated that they use ansible.1530 companies reportedly use ansible in their tech stacks ,including LaunchDarkly ,Tokopedia, and ViaVarejo

INDUSTRIES USE CASES SOLVED BY ANSIBLE :-

In this we will discuss about some famous industries who are using ansible to solve their use cases they are getting while working in a particular scenario.

HOOTSUITE (CASESTUDY)

Organization:

HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard. More than 75% of Fortune 1000 companies now use HootSuite for social media management, social marketing, social customer service, and social selling. Customers include PepsiCo, Virgin, FOX, Sony Music, and WWF.

What is business challenges they are facing?

Our infrastructure is not scripted, repeatable or immutable. Rebuilding a server relies on limited documentation and mostly memory. Lack of repeatability makes automating our infrastructure and application deployment difficult.

Problems they faced?

As they gained popularity crisis struck their servers had to be rebuilt continuously and had to do this consistent unfortunately there as no standard documentation and the entire process relied on memory. This is when the need for ansible realised and come into play

How is Ansible being used to solve their problem?

Today playbooks are written to deploy servers provide a standardization. servers are built and rebuilt in a matter of seconds.

Ansible makes engineers more productive because lots of system libraries and packages are shared among different server types, and as we take advantage of Ansible’s ‘shared’ Playbook they don’t have to repeat the same lib/package install over and over again

REVIEW BY THE COMPANIES

At the beginning I didn’t realize Ansible is good for orchestration as well, but found it out quickly and really loved it. Ansible beats competitors right there (for example, Puppet had to rely MCollective for orchestration, which is a whole new cluster of multiple system to setup, tedious!).

We mostly use Ansible core at this time. We currently are applying Ansible to all of our servers, so we can build any server from scratch and repeat this as many times as we want to. Our future plan is to use Ansible for app deployment, and maybe even ad hoc production server management.

Any plans to grow your Ansible usage moving forward?

We want to build out “Devops” into HootSuite, and our vision is “Software Engineers are engaged in the Entire Cycle of designing, implementing, Deploying and maintaining their software across All Environments”. Ansible will play key part in terms of building repeatable and immutable infrastructure, build tools for automation and giving engineers the ability to provision and manage servers in any environment.

👉 So in the above case study of Hootsuite we came to know how this company solved their use cases using ansible because of ansible features like easy to maintain, consistency, debugging and orchestration they are able to solve their problem easily.

CASESTUDY -2

HOW AWS USING ANSIBLE

Why Use Ansible For AWS?

Now that we’ve gone through the benefits of using a Cloud Platform like AWS and unique features of Ansible, let’s have a look at the magic created by integrating these two legends.

Ansible Features

Ansible has some unique features and when such features collaborate with Amazon Web Services, leaves a mark. Let’s have a look at these incredible features:

1. Ansible is based on an agentless architecture, unlike Chef and Puppet
2. Ansible accesses its host through SSH which is makes the communication between servers and hosts feel like a snap
3. No custom security infrastructure is needed
4. Configuring playbooks and modules is super easy as it follows YAML format
5. Has a wide range of modules for its customers
6. Allows complete configuration management, orchestration, and deployment capability
7. Ansible Vault keeps the secrets safe

1. Cloud As Group Of Services

Cloud is not just a group of servers on someone else’s data center but much more than that. You’ll realize that once you’ve deployed your services on it. There are many services available that let you rapidly deploy and scale your applications. Ansible automation helps you manage your AWS environment like a group of services rather than using them as a group of servers.

2. Ansible Modules Supporting AWS

Ansible is used to define, deploy and manage a wide variety of services. Most complicated AWS environments can be provisioned very easily using a playbook. The best feature is, you create a server-host connection and then run the playbook on just one system and provision multiple other systems with an option to scale up and scale down as per requirement.

Ansible has hundreds of modules supporting AWS and some of them include:

• Autoscaling groups
• Cloud Formation
• Cloud trail
• CloudWatch
• DynamoDB
• ElastiCache
• Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Identity Access Manager (IAM)
• Lambda
• Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Route53
• Security Groups
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
• And many more

3. Dynamic Inventory

In a development environment, hosts keep spinning up and shutting down with diverse business requirements. In such a case, using static inventory might not be sufficient. Such situations call for using Dynamic Inventory. This lets you map hosts based on groups provided by inventory scripts, unlike normal inventory which forces you to map hosts manually which is very tedious.

“So in this case study we came to know that how ansible uses aws to deploy their services”

CASE STUDY -3

How Cisco Using Ansible

Organization:

Cisco is a global leader in compute, network, and cloud solutions for enterprises, data centers, and any infrastructure in between.

Problems they faced?

But as businesses expand and needs evolve, companies are searching for new approaches to meet increased end-user demand while continuing to deliver value to the business — all with limited resources. Automation will become an ever-increasing strategy for enterprises, because as they are finding out, automation is no longer about getting ahead — it is more about keeping up.

Red Hat can help. As the global, trusted leader in open source solutions for today’s enterprises, Red Hat has been helping organizations of all shapes and sizes adapt to continually changing IT requirements. With Red Hat® Ansible® Automation as part of the Red Hat management portfolio, organizations are now able to gain greater efficiency, deliver value faster, and solve IT and business workflow challenges across the entire IT organization.

How is Ansible being used to solve their problem?

Ansible helps network operators and system administrators:

• Limit productivity-killing repetitive, manual tasks.

• Focus efforts that help deliver more value to the business.

• Speed up application delivery.
• Build on a DevOps culture of success, breaking down logical

Ansible Automation provides automation support for a wide range of Cisco products and platforms, including:

• Networking — routing and switching

• IOS
• IOS XR
• IOS XE
• NX-OS
• Networking — Security
• ASA
• FirePOWER (coming soon)
• Cisco software-defined networking (SDN) and controllers
• Application-centric infrastructure (ACI)
• Networking services orchestrator (NSO)
• Digital network architecture (DNA) (coming soon)
• Wireless
• AireOS
• Meraki
• Servers
• Unified Computing System Manager (UCS Manager)

REVIEW BY THE COMPANIES:-

Ansible Automation integrates with Cisco Integrated Management Controller (IMC) to extend capabilities already available for Cisco Nexus switches to Cisco UCS C-Series Rack servers, enabling administrators to manage, automate, and orchestrate their standalone environments from one tool. Specifically, Ansible Automation’s role-based data organization makes it simpler for users to build out large-scale deployments quicker, without having to constantly reorganize the information to configure endpoints.

“So in this case study we came to know that how ansible solve the use-cases of CISCO and tackle their problems”

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BY- SHRISTI SHARMA