How industries are solving challenges using Ansible

1. What is ansible?

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 doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional 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 us to describe any automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

👉 Application of ansible :

1. Configuration management
2. Security and compliance
3. Application Deployment
4. Orchestration
5. Cloud Provisioning

Ansible work flow :

1. As the services increase, sysadmins will provision more servers to do configuration management. They need to install Ansible on the master node where they need to write the code into the Ansible playbook to describe the setup, installation process, and the configuration required for these servers.
2. The local machine connects to these servers (nodes) through an inventory using secured SSH connections.
3. Once these nodes are connected to the master server, then the node servers are analyzed and the playbook codes are pushed toward each of the servers so that these playbooks can configure the servers remotely, which leads to a consistent environment.

Important Terms in Ansible

These are the few important terms using in Ansible —

• Controller Node: This is where Ansible gets installed. The controller machine helps in enabling provisioning on servers we manage.
• Managed Node: This is nodes where the task is executed by the controller node.
• Inventory: This is basically an initializing file that contains information about the servers that we are managing.
• Modules: These are little programs that act as building blocks encapsulating common tasks such as using yum to install packages or ping to test the connection to a remote host.
• Playbook: It is an organized unit of scripts defining an automated work for the configuration management of our server.
• Task: A task block defines a single procedure to be executed on the server like installing packages.

Companies using Ansible

We have data on 8,781 companies that use Ansible. 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. Our data for Ansible usage goes back as far as 3 years and 4 months.

Microsoft

We all know Microsoft the tech giant Microsoft started using ansible a bit ago and as stated by Microsoft after using ansible their network complexity has been increased by 33% and their services had been more efficient and they have added ansible in Azure which is the cloud service provided by Microsoft.

Benefits

• Adopted centralized, phased automation to verify and reuse production code
• Established DevOps culture focused on learning new skills and collaborating across teams
• Saved thousands of work hours by mitigating network downtime and reducing production code defects

MICROSOFT OPERATIONS TEAMS SAVE THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF WORK WITH ANSIBLE WORK

Implementing Ansible has helped Microsoft save thousands of work hours per year, including several weeks’ worth of work by reducing production downtime and network configuration defects. By completing code peer reviews and gated check-ins through preproduction environments, the company has reduced the amount of defects and bugs introduced into its production environment. This approach ultimately reduces major incidents and outages, improving network quality.

Additionally, faster issue resolution means less time is devoted to repetitive support work. “We looked at the types of alerts and tickets that our help desk was getting, and we were able to write automation to take care of almost most of the incidents,” said Dworak. “We actually have a process out right now that closes about 97–98% of the tickets that come in via automation.”

With the time and money saved by adopting standardized, stable automation, Microsoft’s teams can now focus on creating innovative infrastructure solutions that provide higher service quality to end users.

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