HOW INDUSTRIES ARE SOLVING CHALLENGES USING ANSIBLE???
Ansible is an open-source IT automation system that’s great across multiple platforms and environments. At Zia, we use Ansible in installing, deploying customizations, and configuring. Automating tasks is a necessity because in a typical IT infrastructure you often have competing concerns:
– Development, test, and production systems (sometimes more)
– A mix of Linux and Windows platforms
– Custom development and third-party components
With all of these moving parts, it can be difficult to ensure that the right software and configuration is deployed correctly and consistently in the right environment. It is equally important that the deployed software and configuration are known for each environment.
Ansible solves this problem by adding a layer of code (in a sense) that deals with installing, deploying, and updating software. It uses a set of organized components to make this flexible to deal with the headache of multiple environments, platforms, and code versions. At a high level, the key components are:
Inventory
The inventory is a catalog of host information, groups of hosts, and related configuration (such as usernames for each host). Using one inventory file for each environment allows you to manage multiple environments easily.
Playbook
The playbook is the heart of Ansible, where each task is defined. The playbook is divided into one or more plays which themselves are groups of tasks to be performed on a specific host (or group of hosts).
Modules
Modules are the “commands” or “verbs” that Ansible performs in a task. The modules are generically named to support different platforms, but they each generally map to a single function on the target system, such as “shell,” “file,” or “copy.” Other modules deal with Ansible-specific functionality like “template,” which substitutes variable values into a template file and writes the finished file to the remote host.
Subtasks
Sometimes a set of tasks is repeatedly used in a playbook or in multiple playbooks. This set of tasks can be put in a subtasks file and imported into the main playbook.
Templates
A key part of Ansible is the ability to templatize configuration files (for example, the alfresco-global.properties file) and plug-in specific variable values that are relevant to the environment (Ansible inventory) and situation (what third-party modules are deployed).
USE CASES
Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.
Regardless of where you start with Ansible, you’ll find our simple, powerful, and agentless automation platform has the capabilities to solve your most challenging problems.
Provisioning
Provisioning with Ansible allows to seamlessly transition into configuration management, orchestration, and application deployment using the same simple, human-readable, automation language. It works on a large variety of Infrastructure Platforms- Baremetal, Virtualization, Cloud, etc.
Configuration Management
Ansible is the simplest solution for configuration management available. It’s designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure, and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers, and IT managers.
Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of your infrastructure (both human-readable and machine-parsable) — ensuring everyone on your team will be able to understand the meaning of each configuration task. New team members will be able to quickly dive in and make an impact. Existing team members can get work done faster — freeing up cycles to attend to more critical and strategic work instead of configuration management.
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. You can configure needed services as well as push application artifacts from one common system.
Rather than writing custom code to automate your systems, your team writes simple task descriptions that even the newest team member can understand on the first read — saving not only up-front costs but making it easier to react to change over time.
Orchestration
Orchestration is about bringing together disparate things into a coherent whole. There are many different kinds of complex IT orchestrations. The OpenStack cloud platform is built on a variety of separate interlocking services — including separate services for storage, networking, identity, and more. Each of these services has its own dependencies on other services and other components and each has its own separate configurations and sequences for deployment and upgrading. Attempting to deploy, operate, and upgrade an OpenStack cloud can be a complex and daunting task.
Conclusion
Red Hat Ansible helps organizations scale IT automation, manage complex deployments, and govern automation. It allows users to centralize and control their IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, playbooks, and analytics to reduce operational complexity.
