PRACTICAL USE CASE USING ANSIBLE

On 28th December Linux world India organised an "Industry Expert Practical Demo Session on Ansible"

We had a great session with few of the Redhat Dignitaries which was just awesome to seek the words of wisdom from the official Redhat instructors , which was a great evening for us. Although very excited for the session and so was the session.

In this session I learn about:-

1. Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance.

2. a) At individual level automation can be used for provisioning, run simple tasks, manage security, etc.

b) At Enterprise level automation is mostly used for scaling the services at a faster rate to keep up with the industry needs and manage the services by updating services quickly and easily.

3. Scaling means increasing / broadening the clustered system created for running a service. Scaling is needed to manage the increasing workload.

4. Ansible Tower is the Enterprise Ansible Solution built on top of Ansible Engine, whereas Ansible is also known as the Ansible Engine is the command-line tool. Ansible tower provides us with a GUI which is very easy to handle in comparison to Ansible engine. We can create workflows in Ansible Tower. Ansible tower uses API to do automation. Ansible Tower solves multiple use-cases like CI/CD with Workflow, Integrates SCM with Web-hooks, Manage credential, Scaling and High Availability, Notifications etc.

5. A job template is a definition and set of parameters for running an Ansible job. Job templates are useful to execute the same job many times. Job templates also encourage the reuse of Ansible playbook content and collaboration between teams. While the REST API allows for the execution of jobs directly, Tower requires that you first create a job template.

6. Credentials are utilized by Tower for authentication when launching Jobs against machines, synchronizing with inventory sources, and importing project content from a version control system.

7. We can integrate Ansible Tower with Cloud & Notification-based Applications like slack, record, etc by using the workflow visualizer.

Demos And Use Case

• There were powerful demos on the creation of a VPC on top AWS with instances running over it
• Got to know the concept of notification and workflow with the launching of a VM for first testing and then after the permission has been granted from any of the role further deployment code runs

Integration of the Tower with apps like slack

Conclusion

The session added lots of meaning on top of our current learning , with interactive QnA . Got a chance to learn many new technical terms and got to see live of industry standard tools like Ansible Tower, Redhat VM's and their configuration online, ChatOps . orchestration meaning ans lot of new things. The instructors were gentle and calm. And last but not the least thanks to Vimal Sir , Preeti Mam and entire ARTH team for this awesome session