Ansible Automation

……How ansible and its real use case has been an aid for the industries …….

✍ What is ansible ?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.

Its architecture is simple and effective. It works by connecting to your nodes and pushing small programs to them. These programs make the system comply with a desired state, and, when they have finished their tasks, they are deleted.

Ansible works over SSH and doesn’t require any daemons, special servers, or libraries to work. A text editor and a command line tool are usually enough to get your work done.

✍Why ansible ?

Playbooks are really at the heart of what makes Ansible so popular is because they describe the tasks to be done quickly and without the need for the user to know or remember any particular syntax.

Ansible automates and simplifies repetitive, complex, and tedious operations. Everybody likes it because it brings huge time savings when we install packages or configure large numbers of servers. Its architecture is simple and effective. It works by connecting to your nodes and pushing small programs to them. Advantages of ansible :

1. It is agentless. You do not need to install additional software on your server nodes. This helps keep the installation clean while ensuring that there are no conflicts with our software.
2. Playbooks are easy to read and edit. They are mostly written in YAML, and this is a great advantage when compared to other solutions, such as Puppet.
3. It is written in Python, a very popular programming language that is familiar to our engineers, making it easy to extend.

Ansible offers us one more great benefit. It is declarative and not procedural. This means that you write a description of the final state of the machine, and it takes all the necessary steps to fulfill that description

✍Ansible and its use cases !!

There has been data on 8,781 companies that use Ansible. The data claims to be 3–4 months back and gives an overview of the rising ansible technology in the coming world . The companies using Ansible are most often found in United States and in the Computer Software industry. Ansible is most often used by companies with 50–200 employees and 10M-50M dollars in revenue.

If you’re interested in the companies that use Ansible, you may want to check out Atlassian JIRA and GitHub as well.

Companies using ansible :

Ansible Market Share :

Top industries using ansible :

Top countries using ansible :

As enterprises make the move to adopt sophisticated next-generation data center technologies, time to market through the automation of IT tasks has become an essential element. Here is an example of NetApp using ansible

Automating NetApp with Ansible

(Integration)

To enable the adoption around storage technologies, Ansible and NetApp have partnered to develop a collection of automation and storage configuration management modules to easily provision, deploy and manage NetApp ONTAP, Element and E-Series storage platforms.

NetApp is a Red Hat Certified Support Module Vendor.

The Ansible and NetApp modules provide idempotent provisioning for:

• Aggregates
• Asynchronous Mirroring
• Checking Connections
• Disk Pools
• Hosts and Host Groups (Clusters)
• License Management
• More……

These modules have been qualified by NetApp engineering to ensure they meet a variety of needs including provisioning, replication and general management.

Solution Benefits

With Ansible customers can automate NetApp solutions to deliver flexible, scalable and highly reliable storage deployment and management solutions for NetApp ONTAP, Element and E-Series storage systems

• Roll storage-infrastructure configurations into your CI/CD processes and application configurations for maximum agility with over 60 Ansible modules for NetApp.
• Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform
• Ansible and NetApp enable a lower cost of ownership and ease of setup by reducing the time to deploy and manage your storage.

Though ansible has spread its root towards many companies by deploying or managing the servers . Despite of all the companies which have used ansible for integration as mentioned NETAPP , IBM Security , Windows and more. Here brings another example of trivago using ansible :

Ansible in trivago :

trivago is the world’s largest hotel search! trivago compares prices from over 700,000 hotels on over 175 booking sites so users can find their ideal hotel.

Trivago is a metasearch hotel search site that quickly sifts through the metadata of hotel sites and other travel booking portals to find you the best deal in a matter of seconds.

From the team :

With employees from all over the world, trivago is an international IT company operating on a very large scale. Our goal is to provide the best hotel search possible. This blog is the ideal place to talk about our ideas, our prototypes and our tech stack which make our vision become reality. We love to collaborate and communicate so please be invited to contact us and comment on our posts.

The company has mentioned in their stack share that it uses a collaboration of many technologies to meet the expectations . One such tool here is ANSIBLE.

The company has been using the ansible technologies for the server configuration purpose . The ansible playbooks provide the easy and fast management for the same . It has reduced the effort of launching servers manually when the inbound traffic scales up.

Trivago has used the playbooks to achieve intra-cluster traffic mirroring. It has helped making the things easier and better . It avoids the problems of traffic .

By mirroring traffic with Istio, you can develop features based on the actual, live traffic. No extra dependencies, the exact same traffic and no server to generate the mock traffic. Another beauty of Istio is that you can configure the mirrored traffic percentage easily, just by adjusting one parameter in the ansible playbooks namely mirror_percent All this means, they are reducing the delta between the environments even more.