3 Quick Reasons Why Ansible is Great for Devs, Ops, and Cross-Functionality

• Ansible uses SSH

There are many reasons to use Ansible: agentless, Open-Source Software (OSS), idempotent, etc. But let’s come back to the way Ansible works. It uses SSH. Think about whenever you’re not directly in front the server you’re working on (a good portion of the time, right?). Typically getting into these machines relies on SSH. In fact, it’s the first thing Amazon Web Services (AWS) tells you to set up before you can log in to their Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances. For those unfamiliar, EC2 is the equivalent of a Virtual Machine. The idea that Ansible uses SSH just seems so natural to configure any server because it’s what Developers (Devs) and Operations (Ops) do when they first log in to a remote machine.

• Everything-as-Code!

If we can put everything into code, then we can recreate an entire system. Not JUST a single server. Ansible has support for Network Automation, building and configuring clusters, literally anything that it can get to via SSH! This is fantastic because a serious concern to Devs is how different environments are configured for their code. When you keep all of that configuration and infrastructure information stored as code it allows for entire environments to be recreated. No hassle, no forgetting minor tweaks, and no one-of-configuration changes that break environment X but not environment Y. Everything can be torn down and recreated, and it should be. This is a behavior change, and yes it will take some time. But it builds practices to insure that your stack isn’t a fragile Jenga tower.

• Promote Cross-Functionality

The importance of this should not be undersold. The idea of Cross-Functionality between teams is a beautiful one. Effectively, any other person on the team could help out when someone goes on a sabbatical (this includes Ops). Now, Ops configures/maintains/builds the servers/platforms/infrastructure. If they use Ansible to get the job done AND Developers start using Ansible to help maintain the configuration for all of the servers/containers that their code runs on… there is now a common understanding of how to use Ansible! Developers have been trained on Ansible and they could come in and help out Ops! Or at very least put Developer information and Operations information in the same place, using the same language. Fantastic for shared knowledge! Now, break down those Silos!