How Industries Are Using Ansible
What is Ansible ?
Ansible is an open-source tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is used for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy. It can configure both UNIX-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
Ansible is also useful to everyday users. It allows you to configure not just one computer, but potentially a whole network of computers at once, and using it requires no programming skills. Instructions written for Ansible are human-readable.
Use cases of Ansible
If you are PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible helps streamline the process.
Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.
On defining your application, and managing the deployment with Ansible, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.
Creating a CI/CD (Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery) pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.
Scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.
Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole.
Integration of Ansible by Companies
Ansible includes numerous modules to support a wide variety of IT integrations.
Red Hat (Infrastructure)
Customers around the world are relying on Red Hat for their IT infrastructure. With Ansible, Red Hat deployment becomes quick, and also brings Ansible’s simple IT automation to all aspects of one’s business.
Few integration examples include:
Management / Satellite
- Deploy Satellite agents to servers
- Unify post-build systems management
- Manage server channel subscriptions
- Ease migration between Satellite infrastructures
- Unify disparate update and management infrastructures
Infrastructure / RHEL
- Existing environment baselining and management
- System deployment, configuration, and management
- Orchestrate complex environment standups
- Unify the management of multiple major and minor releases
- Discover Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) versions and reconcile subscriptions
Storage / Ceph
- Deploy and manage Ceph environments
- Scale Ceph components
Management / Insights
- Automated remediation, enabling users to automatically remediate Insights findings
- Deploy Insights in highly-scalable, secure manner
- Streamline large and small deployments of Insights client
VMware (Infrastructure)
Make it possible to do more with what you already have. Ansible will help you automate your VMware infrastructure and accelerate the process from development to production.
With Ansible, one member on your team can figure out how to solve a problem, automate the solution with Ansible, and then everyone knows how to solve the problem. Expanding automation to allow everyone to participate will ensure you get the most out of your existing infrastructure, and will prepare your organization for tools such as a cloud manager — helping you realize even greater benefits.
Out of the box, Ansible ships with over 50 VMware modules supporting most use cases, including:
- Managing vSphere datacenters, clusters, hosts and guests
- VM template and snapshot management
- vSwitches, DNS settings, firewall rules and NAT gateway rules
AWS (Cloud)
Deploying an application into AWS, shows that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else’s data center. It is a fleet of services available for rapidly deployment and scaling applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can helps manage the AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.
Out of the box, Ansible has nearly 100 modules supporting AWS capabilities, including - AMI Management, Autoscaling Groups, CloudFormation,, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Elastic Block Store (EBS), Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Elastic IPs (EIP), Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), Identity Access Manager (IAM), Kinesis, Lambda, Relational Database Service, Route53, Security Groups, Security Token Service, Simple Storage Service (S3), Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), etc.
Atlassian (DevOps Tools)
This suite of DevOps tools support team functions across development workflow, including: tracking, collaboration, code, build and ship.
Ansible is such a powerful and flexible tool — automating tasks from configuration management to code deployment to interacting with various APIs — that we describe it as DevOps glue, connecting components in the toolchain.
Atlassian’s phases of the development cycle and Ansible integrations:
- Plan — Collaboration: HipChat, JIRA Software
- Build — Staging, Infrastructure as code, Collaboration: Bitbucket, Red Hat Ansible Tower
- Continuous integration — CI, Testing: Bitbucket Pipelines, HipChat
- Deploy — Release dashboards, Automated deployment: JIRA Software, HipChat, Red Hat Ansible Tower
- Operate — APM, Communication, Issue tracking: HipChat, JIRA Software
- Continuous feedback — User feedback: HipChat
Integration Benefits
The combined Ansible and Atlassian solution provides:
- Accuracy — repeatable process eliminates human error
- Speed — automated workflow allows rapid development changes
- Ubiquity — enforce consistency across environments
- Control — role based or self-service
- Knowledge — visibility across teams
IBM
IBM Security QRadar is a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) that enables security teams to collect and analyze event and log data in real-time from multiple sources, for early detection of cyberthreats. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables security teams to automate key QRadar operational tasks through Ansible workflows that support incident response, forensics and regulatory compliance.
Ansible modules allow users to integrate QRadar in sophisticated security automated workflows through the automation of the following functionalities:
- Log sources configuration
- Offense rules enablement
- Offense management
Solution Benefits
- Automate QRadar configuration deployments
- Access data sources programmatically to support investigation activities
- Enable and disable correlation rules through workflows for incidents prioritization
- Change the priority of an offense, change its ownership and track activities in it’s note field directly via Ansible
Summing up
Ansible is designed and built to ensure that an IT organization can start automating their tasks in new ways. The benefits are clear: by automating the repetition out of their daily lives, IT team members are able to focus on more interesting value-added tasks. Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today. With over 2,900+ contributors submitting new modules all the time, new automations are being covered in ansible regularly.
