Ansible & Industry
After the introduction of ANSIBLE in the IT industry, Automation has paced up….
Hey wait!
What’s ANSIBLE🤔
Ansible is an open-source IT automation engine, which can remove drudgery from your work life, and will also dramatically improve the scalability, consistency, and reliability of your IT environment.
Features of Anisble :
- Human Readable Automation
- Task are executed in order
- No special coding skills is required
- App deployment
- Configuration Management
- Workflow orchestration
- Orchestrate the app life cycle
It has agent less architecture thus it is easier to deploy. It uses open-ssh and winrm which makes it reliable and secure.
Ansible is all about Automation. It requires commands to perform the concerned task. Since it do not require specialised coding the we need to know a rough information of the syntax. It doesn't have it’s own language. It uses YAML as it’s language.
Ansible is famous since it has being provided the intelligence. It detects the OS being used by the manage node and like wise gathers the information and conducts the task.
Ansible Architecture
⁂ Inventory- is a list of manger nodes or the target nodes which contains the IP’s, databases, servers of the mange nodes.
⁂ Modules- are the programs in ansible which are added when required. After the execution of these modules , they are removed. It does not required and database or server to reside on. It resides on the top of any OS.
⁂ API- it is the transport service for the public or private cloud services.
⁂ Plugins- are the codes which expends the core functionality of the of Ansible. We can write our own plugins.
⁂ Ansible -Playbook is a place we can write our own code. The format for code which it supports is YAML.
⁂Hosts- are the nodes which are automated by Ansible and any other OS / machine.
⁂Networking- Ansible is a agentless network. It is simple, powerful, secure and reliable software.
⁂ Cloud- is the network of remote servers where data can be stored, process and managed. These servers are stored on internet and managed remotely. It launches it’s resources and instances over cloud and we can connect them to our servers and use accoring to our needs and the OS requirements.
⁂CMDB- is the repository which is acting as the data warehouse for installation purpose.
Tasks automated by Ansible
⁘ Provisioning
⁘ Configuration Management
⁘ Application Deployment
Uses case of Ansible
Ansible and Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides scalable infrastructure and solutions to meet the needs of your organization.
What GCP offers 🙄
- demand instances
- software-defined networking
- storage and databases
- big data solutions
GCP enables your applications to take advantage of Google’s significant infrastructure, utilizing their best-of-breed technology and innovation, and only pay for what you need when you need it.
Why GCP needs help of Ansible?
For provisioning instances and autoscaling, custom networks and load balancing, and even managing DNS and cloud storage, it’s all provided.
What was the result after joining the hands with ansible?
Testing/Continuous Integration
- Use Ansible to launch instances in any GCP Zone, configure networking setups to accurately simulate real-world scenarios
- Deploy your code how you want: private disk images, startup scripts pointing to your own package repository and more — all within your native Ansible Playbooks
- Tear-down instances when you’re done: right after a test or after a review with the team and even keep a snapshot of the disk
Production Deployment
- Use GCP Managed Instance Groups (Playbook example) and autoscaling to ensure your application can meet the needs of its users
- Easily use Cross-Region Load Balancing to have your application served by the closest-available zone
- Enable Service Accounts with specific access, enabling only those who need it to run your playbooks in production to have your application served by the closest-available zone
- Enable Service Accounts with specific access, enabling only those who need it to run your playbooks in production
Leverage Containers Without the Hassle
Easily deploy containers in Google’s managed container environment (Container Engine)
Store and access your container images in our Container Registry
Autoscaling, advanced networking and Logging giving you full control to understand and tune your cluster
Ansible and Vodafone-Idea
Why VI is using ansible?
To transform its distributed network data centres to open standards VI is using Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat is enabling Vodafone Idea to design efficient pods, which can be geographically distributed and taken closer to the end- users, helping to reduce latency and enable an optimal user experience.
Vodafone Idea can use Red Hat’s open APIs to deliver actionable insights to its enterprise users.
Vishant Vora, chief technology officer of Vodafone Idea, said: “Our collaboration with Red Hat has helped us deploy Universal Cloud based on open standards and systems.”
“By adopting a DevOps-centered workflow based on Red open hybrid cloud technologies, Vodafone Idea customers can more quickly adapt to changing market conditions” Marshal Correia, vice president and general manager, Red Hat India, said.
Ansible and NASA
NASA uses Ansible Tower to better manage their environment, provide better security as well as to increase efficiency.
NASA focused to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data centre in a rapid time-line to a cloud-based environment. The rapid time-line resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment.
NASA gained significant cost savings from the change in infrastructure but did not allow for immediate cloud optimisation of the applications and sites.
Due to rapid migration requirement , an environment of spanning multiple virtual private clouds and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. This resulted in scenarios where even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.”
Conclusion
As a conclusion we get that Ansible provides excellent automated infrastructure configuration capabilities and, at the same time, has minimal requirements compared to the competition, so that the user does not have to write anything but the Playbook scripts in advance and no further manual work is required.
