Ansible 1:

What is Ansible? Ansible for DevOps

How we can use Ansible to automate IT and DevOps?

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Ansible is an absolutely free and open-source tool that is used for the above-mentioned purposes.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

What do we can automate using ansible?

Ansible is an open-source community project sponsored by Red Hat, it’s the simplest way to automate IT. Ansible is the only automation language that can be used across entire IT teams from systems and network administrators to developers and managers.

Ansible functionality addresses key security and compliance use cases for service providers, including:

• Standardizing and enforcing auditing and compliance.
• Maintaining firewall compliance.
• Centralizing all system-related changes.
• Upgrading driver and firmware.
• Automating remediation and patching of system vulnerabilities, such as Wannacry, Spectre, and Meltdown.
• Detecting system vulnerabilities and needed remediation by gathering Ansible facts and system event logs and exporting the information to system monitoring tools.

Ansible for DevOps

Automation has transformed factories. It gave manufacturing the ability to perform work faster, more efficiently, at a higher quality. Factories increased productivity as well as quality.

Factories that failed to automate fell behind due to so much competition in the market. That's why automation became essential for businesses to sustain.

IT departments are the modern factories powering today’s digital businesses. And just as today’s factories can’t compete without automation, automation will soon become imperative for IT organizations. because

1. Application delivery is fuel for growth
2. Automation simplifies process and automation never sleeps
3. Don’t repeat the same task over and over
4. Speed up your workflow

You need a tool that can act as the glue layer automating across services and applications no matter where they are. Once one person on your team learns how to do something, they can capture their solution in an Ansible Playbook and enable everyone to use it

Simple to adopt, simple to use, simple to understand — Ansible is designed around the way people work and the way people work together across the entire organization:

1. Dev

Challenge: Dev spending too much time focusing on tooling required to deliver capabilities and not enough time focusing on results

Need: To respond and scale in pace with demand

How does Ansible automation help?

• Accelerates feedback loop
• Discover bugs sooner
• Reduces risk of tribal knowledge
• Faster, coordinated, and more reliable deployments

2. Ops

Challenge: Need technology that can be used across many different groups with many different skill sets

Need: Centrally govern and monitor disparate systems and workloads

How does Ansible automation help?

• Reduce shadow IT
• Reduce deployment time
• Provision systems faster
• Reduce risk of tribal knowledge
• Deploy automated patching

3. QA/Security

Challenge: Tracking of what changed where and when

Need: Reduce risk of human error

How does Ansible automation help?

• Establish identical QA, Dev, and Prod environments for faster, coordinated, and more reliable deployments
• Establish security baselines
• Increase visibility and accuracy for compliance requirements
• Relieve the burden of traditional documentation by creating living, testable documentation

3. Business

Challenge: Getting to market faster

Need: Create a competitive advantage

How does Ansible automation help?

• Align IT with the business
• Increase time for innovation and strategy
• Reduce costs of onboarding new team members
• Increase cross-team collaboration

I hope you learned something new and find ansible interesting.
Let me know your thoughts about ansible and how do plan to use ansible?

Thank you.

About the writer:
Shubham loves technology, challenges, is open to learning and reinventing himself. He loves to share his knowledge. He is passionate about constant improvements.
Visit his Medium home page to read more insights from him.