Ansible: How industries are solving challenges using Ansible

In this article, we come to know about:

• What is Ansible
• Architecture of Ansible
• Ansible: Concept
• Why we need Ansible
• How Ansible solve Industry's challenges

What is Ansible?

Basically, Ansible is a simple IT automation tool that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. You can use Ansible to automate the configuration management, application deployment, provisioning, orchestration, continuous testing f already install applications, and automation of tasks.

It is an open-source tool and very simple to set-up & use. No special coding skills required to use Ansible Playbooks. These Playbooks are written in very simple language (YAML). This is an Agentless tool means that you don’t need to install any extra software or firewall ports on the client systems that you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure. You can automate as many systems as you want at a time.

The Architecture Of Ansible

• Controller Node: Systems or servers where we configure Ansible to manage the other servers and where we run our playbooks & Ansible commands, is known as Controller Node.
• Managed/Target Node: Those systems/servers that are managed with Ansible is known as Managed Node. These are agentless means there is no software required at the managed node. It is also known as 'Host'
• Inventory: Ansible inventory is a file where we define information about all hosts such as IP Address, User Name, User Password & Connection Type. We can also create groups for multiple hosts.
• PlayBook: The script we write to manage the target in Ansible is known as Playbook. If Ansible modules are the tools in your workshop then playbooks are your design plans. Ansible Playbooks are written in YAML language and use YAML syntax. Playbooks may contain more the one play. Every Play contains the name hosts group to connect to and tasks need to be performed. Every Play in the Playbook performs in sequential order.
• Modules: Modules provide Ansible, means to control or manage resources on local or remote servers. They perform a variety of functions. For example, A module may be responsible for rebooting a machine or simply display a message on the screen. Ansible allows users to write their own module and also provide out-of-the-box core & extra modules. Core modules are maintained by the core Ansible team and always shipped with Ansible. Extra modules are maintained by some communities and might be shipped separately in the future.

Ansible: Concepts

• Modules: Accomplished dedicated Tasks(set values, use templates)
• Tasks: Execute Modules specific parameters, variables, etc
• Variables: Configuration-wide, Playbook/Roles specific vars
• Facts: Gather Information about the target nodes
• Handlers: Like Tasks, but usually get called by another Tasks
• Roles: Group related Tasks, encapsulate data to Accomplish Tasks
• Files: Files directory contains files copied over to the target
• Templates: Jinja2 format with placeholders to insert variables
• Vault: Encrypted sensible data
• Plays: are a list of Tasks which apply to hosts/ hosts group
• Playbooks: YAML formatted files orchestrate steps sequential
• Inventory: A combination of hosts and groups

Why We Need Ansible?

• Agent-less architecture(No agent is required, everything is done by using SSH, SSH for communication)
• Free open-source application
• No centralized server, no client-side Agent
• SSH-based
• Configuration as data, not code(YAML files)
• Full configuration management, deployment & orchestration
• Custom modules can be written in any programming language
• JSON input/output is sufficient to integrate a module into Ansible

Use-Cases

Microsoft Azure

Automate Microsoft Azure simply

Chances are teams in your organization are already successfully deploying workloads in the public cloud. As more new applications are built natively for the cloud, IT leaders are looking for ways to deliver a consistent customer experience and management strategy across cloud and on-premise applications. The good news - if your IT teams are already using Ansible to describe on-premise infrastructure and applications, then you can easily use these descriptions to automate the same workloads in Microsoft Azure.

Azure supports customers’ push to a hybrid cloud in the areas of infrastructure, user identity, and management. Using Ansible to automate these Azure services gives organizations the flexibility to run workloads where they best make sense.

Automate once, Deploy anywhere

Ansible’s library of Azure modules makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete Azure infrastructure whenever you need, and in any region you require. For example, the same simple Playbook language you use for application deployment and on-prem automation also provisions your Azure infrastructure, applying the correct configuration.

Once you use Ansible to define your application locally, you can repeatedly deploy and redeploy the application. Re-deploying it to a different infrastructure is as straightforward as defining your Azure environment and then applying your application’s Playbook. No more surprises. Because of its power and flexibility, Ansible ensures your Azure deployments work seamlessly in a hybrid cloud configuration as easily as you build a single system.

Windows, Linux, Services, Networks AND MORE

Azure hosts a lot more than just Windows, and thankfully Ansible automates it all. Ansible has been designed for cloud deployments from the beginning, and Ansible easily allows you to provision a variety of Azure cloud services. Whether you’re building a simple 3-tier application, or a complicated set of virtual private clouds, services, and applications, your Azure environments can be described in Ansible Playbooks, and then scaled out across regions.

Ansible has modules for many different Azure capabilities, including:

• Virtual Machines
• Virtual Networks
• Storage and Storage Accounts
• Resource Groups
• Security Groups
• Resource Manager Templated Deployments

Ansible also has hundreds and hundreds of additional modules that help you manage every aspect of your Linux, Windows, UNIX, network infrastructure, and applications - regardless of where they're deployed.

Automating in Azure at Scale

As your Azure footprint and supporting teams grow, you will realize the need for controls to restrict users’ ability to modify certain environments. The answer is simple: Red Hat® Ansible® Tower gives you an enterprise framework for controlling, securing, and managing Ansible automation with a UI and RESTful API.

Ansible Tower helps teams who use Ansible with an extensive set of role-based access controls that ensures users will only have access to the Azure resources (networks, systems, security groups, etc.) that are required for their job. Plus, Ansible Tower encrypts credentials such as Azure and SSH keys so that you can delegate simple automation jobs to junior employees without giving out the (literal) keys to the kingdom.

Splunk

Improve your application build pipeline

The speed and quality of your application delivery are essential to your business. Splunk provides the leading operational intelligence platform that makes machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. Ansible is the IT automation engine that helps you end repetitive tasks, speed productivity, and scale your efforts.

Red Hat® Ansible® Tower and the Splunk platform are popular tools used by many of today’s top organizations. These platforms are complementary. Where Ansible Tower automates complex multi-tier deployments, Splunk software is used to analyze and correlate operational data collected from these deployments. Combining these approaches yields natural benefits.

The Ansible Tower integration for Splunk

Using Ansible Tower's built-in logging integrations, you can push the operational data describing your infrastructure from Ansible Tower directly into Splunk. This allows you to run Splunk software queries on this data and correlate it with other data sources for a comprehensive view into the DevOps-driven build pipeline.

This real-time visibility improves the speed, quality, and business impact of your application build pipeline. 

Get More Out of Your Ansible Tower Data

Let’s consider an example where your Ops team is using Ansible Tower for configuration management and application deployment, and the Splunk platform is used to analyze machine data from on-prem and public cloud infrastructure. What if you could access all your Ansible data in the Splunk platform? What new insights could you gain about your deployments and processes?

The Ansible Tower Integration for Splunk will give you the ability to provide real-time operational visibility into your deployments:

• Who launched a job?
• What credentials were used?
• When did the job complete, and how long did it take?
• What changed - or was not changed - in your environment?

The machine data provided by Ansible Tower into the Splunk platform enable greater control and visibility. The Splunk platform will collect, analyze, and act upon Ansible Tower data generated by your infrastructure and business applications delivery pipeline. Through analyzing this data, it becomes easier to identify the correlation between deployments and hosts.

Teams using Ansible Tower in combination with Splunk will find many other ways to leverage this new data set within the Splunk platform.

Cisco

CISCO ENABLES DevOps

As customers embrace the DevOps model to accelerate application deployment and achieve higher efficiency in operating their data centers, the infrastructure needs to change and respond faster than ever to business needs. These changes can help you achieve an agile operational model by improving automation, innovation, and consistency.

The Cisco Nexus platform allows you to easily:

• Integrate your applications into your customer's existing DevOps tools chain
• Improve flexibility in installing and deploying whatever protocol package or custom applications you need on the switch
• Get open and full access to switch resources and data

Integrated Solution

The feature-richness in Cisco Nexus NX-OS combined with the scaling and performance capabilities enable customers to build efficient data centers.

The Ansible integration with Cisco Nexus platforms enables customers to take advantage of programming and automating the infrastructure at scale with speed.

Ansible accelerates Day 0, 1, and 2 operations in the following ways:

• Day 0 – Automates device bring up
• Day 1 – Push network configurations to maintain consistency across the infrastructure
• Day 2 – Optimizes network compliance and operation

Solution Benefits

The combined Ansible and Cisco solution provides:

• Speed IT Transformation
• Leverage Open Ecosystem
• Efficient Operational Model
• Faster Adoption
• Improve Speed and Agility

“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.”

Thanks For Reading...