ANSIBLE : How Industries are solving Challenges using Ansible

What is Ansible?

• Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intra service orchestration, and provisioning.

• Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they had to do everything manually.

•  Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization.

• In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency.

• Ansible is rapidly rising to the top in the world of automation tools. 

But, We already had an automation for configuration from couple of decades. Then why to use Ansible? What's giving popularity to ansible?

So, the reason is, ansible have some extra feature, it provides something else due to which it's so famous from past 5-6 years. 

And this extra thing is INTELLIGENCE.

Modules provides intelligence to the ansible. 
Ansible works on Declarative Language. Here you only have to tell what to do. Don't need to tell it how to do. 

Some Advantages of Ansible are :

• Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.
• Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
• Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows. 
• Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
• Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
• Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.

Let's see how Industries are solving challenges using Ansible:

1. CommunityCo

CommunityCo builds personalized, invitation-only communities using data, technology and concierge-level community management to connect professionals to the right peers and resources they need — exactly when they need it.

Challenge : CommunityCo had minimal code deployment automation and no server automation. 

All server deployment tasks were processed manually. Unsurprisingly, deployments ate up a lot of time and created serious potential for both human error and inconsistencies between development and production environments.

Solution : Using Ansible’s Amazon Web Services cloud module, G2 architected a solution for CommunityCo to better manage updates with automation by: 

• Deploying and configuring Amazon Elastic Load Balancers and Autoscaling Groups.
• Automating EC2 and RDS instance deployment across multiple application stacks.
• Scripting rolling updates for patching and overall release management from version control. 
• Enabling application installation on the fly via automated AMI bundling.

Result : Today, CommunityCo benefits from: 

• A repeatable deployment process, facilitating the creation of UAT and SIT environments with the push of a button 
• The ability to release code into production in seconds 
• A reusable and consistent process that helps mitigate human error 
• A clear rollback strategy that mitigates the impact of unforeseen anomalies

2. ELO

Elo Serviços S.A is a Brazilian credit and debit card brand, founded in 2011. The business was created as a joint venture by the three leading Brazilian banks, Banco do Brasil, Bradesco and Caixa Econômica Federal. Elo has a 12% market share, with 115 million cards in circulation.

Challenge : Elo sought to partner with a technology vendor to find a new platform for quickly developing and deploying applications using virtual machines (VMs).

The company also sought to create application programming interfaces (APIs) to better connect its services with its three parent banks, other payment platforms, and e-commerce sites to further speed and streamline work.

Solution : To gain these new capabilities using an open source solution, Elo decided to partner with Red Hat.

 “We’re fans of open source and don’t want to be locked into one technology or vendor,” said Agapito. “As a result, we found that Red Hat is the ideal partner.”

 With assistance from a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), the company deployed several enterprise technologies from Red Hat, including:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a stable, proven operating system foundation for launching new applications, standardizing virtual environments, and supporting hybrid cloud computing.
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a solution that integrates Linux containers, Kubernetes, and other container technologies to support application development and deployment in public or private clouds.
• Red Hat Ansible Tower, a simple IT automation engine that provides cloud provisioning, configuration, deployment, and orchestration capabilities. Ansible Tower also provides a visual management dashboard for role-based access control, job scheduling, and inventory management.
• Red Hat Satellite, a system management solution that makes Red Hat infrastructure easier to deploy, scale, and manage. This solution helps users provision, configure, and update systems to ensure they are running efficiently and in compliance with standards.
• Red Hat Gluster Storage, scale-out file storage ideal for cloud environments. This storage platform helps enterprises easily manage and secure big, unstructured, and semi-structured data. 

Elo worked with its Red Hat TAM, as well as a sales architect and Red Hat Consulting, to complete a phased deployment of these new Red Hat solutions. Beginning with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, deployment times ranged from four days to two weeks.

Result : 

FASTER TIME TO MARKET FOR NEW SERVICES 

With its new Red Hat environment, particularly Ansible Tower and OpenShift Container Platform, Elo can use automation to speed provisioning and other IT processes. “Previously, it took us up to 45 days to deploy a server,” said Agapito. “With Red Hat Ansible Tower, the process takes just one or two days.”

SIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT AND INTEGRATION

Red Hat’s enterprise open source software helps Elo more easily manage its IT resources. With its RESTful API and command-line interface (CLI), Ansible Tower is easily embedded into Elo’s existing tools and processes. As a result, Elo’s small IT team can easily manage the company’s IT infrastructure—including deployment, configuration, and orchestration processes.

ENHANCED SECURITY 

Improved management with Ansible Tower helps Elo gain insight into IT security to protect customer and company data from threats and errors and meet compliance requirements. For example, with security audit reports, role-based access, and server auditing provided by Red Hat Satellite—as well as guidance for using SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux)—Elo has now achieved Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) certification.