Ansible — Industry Use Cases

This blog is about how Ansible the automation tool is aiding the industry by pushing automation in every field.

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

What can Ansible do??

Well, although ansible is used mostly for Configuration Management but with the right knowledge ansible can be used to do the following

1) Configuration Management :

Ansible used to centralized the Configuration using file management for the common steps used for configuring a particular Software inside a System.

2) Application Deployment :

From development to Production all the life cycle could be achieved and managed efficiently using Ansible.

3) Provisioning :

Application can be deployed or installed on system using Ansible.

4) Continuous Delivery:

Ansible Playbook keep the application deployment proper and manage throughout the entire life Cycle

5) Security and Compliance:

Scanning and Remediation of site wide security policies can be integrated into other automated processes.

6) Orchestration :

The interaction of multiple configured system must be defined, and the rest is taken care by ansible itself.

7) Idempotence Nature:

If a mentioned Task in Ansible Playbook is done already then to save the resources Ansible has various modules which are idempotent in nature.

8) Replication :

Configuration management makes it easy to replicate environments with the exact same software and configurations. This enables you to effectively build a multistage ecosystem, with production, development, and testing servers.

9) Abstraction :

Ansible works on RAL concept i.e Resource Abstraction Layer. The modules and Ansible Architecture itself is built to support this. It uses concept of IAS i.e Infrastructure as Code. Which will work on all the Types of Operation System with any kind of version.

Ansible is so much popular and easy to use as it comes with the integrations of the following tools in the forms of hundreds of modules, ready at your disposal to be used

· Juniper · NetApp · Splunk · AWS · VMWare · Cisco · GCP …And a long list continues

A few Companies who use this tool are:-

Hootsuite, Amelco, Lifesum, Trivago…

LifeSum

Based in Stockholm, Lifesum is a digital health platform that encourages users to lead a healthier, more balanced lifestyle. Lifesum has proved hugely successful throughout Europe, reaching over 6 million downloads so far.

Lifesum’s platform uses a host of applications, in addition to a joint back end API, and it bases its infrastructure on AWS. Lifesum was looking for a simplified yet robust tool to allow configuration management, application deployment, and server provisioning.

It started their Ansible migration in 2014. It started implementing Ansible straight away and has used it in several major areas. First, Lifesum used Ansible playbooks “to automatically spin up virtual development machines with Vagrant”.

Lifesum:- “We use AWS Auto Scaling and pre-bake Amazon AMI images with Ansible provisioning playbooks. When EC2 instances are launched by Auto Scaling, Ansible, triggered by cloud-init, runs provisioning playbooks, once again ensuring up-to-date configuration changes are applied, and pulling the latest applications versions from repositories. Ansible has helped us to automate, significantly simplify and speed up the process of dynamic resources scaling”.

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.

Behind the seen Trivago is using A stack of Technology for faster results with Zero downtime. Ansible is also contributing as one of the Technology for robust results.

And there are many more instances of Ansible making lives of engineers easy and the technology so much dependable.

— Thank you for reading..