How industries are solving their challenges using Ansible?
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Hello Readers.
In this article, we will look into How Industries are using Ansible and Solving their Challenges.
Before Coming into use cases of Ansible. Let’s discuss some basic things about Ansible.
◾️ What is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source automation tool, or platform, used for IT tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, intraservice orchestration, and provisioning.
Ansible Workflow :
As the services increase, system admins 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.
The local machine connects to these servers (nodes) through an inventory using secured SSH connections.
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.
There are more than 8500+ companies that are using ansible.
Ansible use-cases:
Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.
● Provisioning
● Configuration management
● Application deployment
● Continuous delivery
● Security automation
● Orchestration
Advantages of Ansible :
● It is a free open-source application
● Agent-less no need for agent installation
● Python/yaml based
● Highly flexible and configuration management of systems
● Large number of ready to use modules for system management
● Simple and human readable
● Custom modules can be added if needed
● Self-documenting
In industries ansible is used for:
●Provision — Ansible can provision and manage the storage in your infrastructure. From software-defined storage, cloud-based storage, or even hardware storage appliances, you can find a module to leverage Ansible’s common, powerful language.
●Continuous Delivery — Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use.
●Security Automation — Keeping your data secure is the most crucial part. security policy can be integrated into other automated processes.
●Orchestration- It allows you to define your infrastructure once and use it wherever and however you need. Once you’ve got Ansible playbooks that describe your multi-node production infrastructure, you can then use the same orchestration to deploy it on your laptop for testing.
Ansible includes hundreds of modules to support a wide variety of IT integrations, including:
ANSIBLE and MICROSOFT AZURE :
Automate Microsoft Azure simply — Chances are teams in your organization are already successfully deploying workloads in 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 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.
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 and AWS :
The Power of AWS Meets Ansible Simplicity — Using Ansible to automate your applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success. The breadth of AWS capability enables IT organizations to dynamically provision entire workloads like never before.
Manage Cloud Like Cloud with Ansible — When you deploy an application into AWS, you will soon realize that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else’s data center. You now have a fleet of services available to you to rapidly deploy and scale applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can help you manage your AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.
Safely Automating at the Speed of Business — When you only had one or two engineers working in AWS, everything seemed easy. Now that you’ve got ten or more, you need controls in place that restrict users’ ability to modify certain environments. Ansible Tower delivers with its extensive set of role-based access controls that ensures users will only have access to the AWS resources (networks, systems, security groups, etc.) that they require for their job. Plus, Ansible Tower encrypts credentials such as AWS and SSH keys so that you can delegate simple automation jobs to junior employees without giving out the keys.
Migrations Made Easy — Your CIO just mandated that you have to migrate dozens of workloads to AWS. With Ansible, you can use the same simple playbook language to manage your infrastructure and deploy your application. Use Ansible to define your application locally. Once you can repeatedly deploy that application locally, re-deploying it to a different infrastructure is as straightforward as defining your AWS environment, and then applying your application’s playbook. No more surprises.
ANSIBLE and GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
Ansible puts Google Technology at Your Fingertips — Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides scalable infrastructure and solutions to meet the needs of your organization. GCP offers on-demand instances, software-defined networking, storage and databases, and big data solutions — and they’re all available at your fingertips. GCP enables your applications to take advantage of Google’s significant infrastructure, utilizing their best-of-breed technology and innovation, and only pay for what you need when you need it.
Ansible and Google Native Integration — The Ansible/GCP integration gives you everything you need to manage your IT infrastructure. From provisioning instances and autoscaling, custom networks and load balancing, and even managing DNS and cloud storage, it’s all provided. Use the Ansible/GCP tutorial and examples in your Playbooks.
Google is an Active Contributor to the Ansible Community — The Ansible open source community is a vibrant, fast-moving place that strives to get things done. Google thrives in open source, but also understands the reliability needs of its users to safely run their infrastructure. Google Engineering actively builds Ansible modules, contributes code and documentation, and helps users deliver their solutions with GCP.
ANSIBLE and IBM QRadar
Automate Intelligence — IBM Security QRadar is a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) that enables security teams to collect and analyze event and log data in real-time from multiple sources, for early detection of cyberthreats. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables security teams to automate key QRadar operational tasks through Ansible workflows that support incident response, forensics and regulatory compliance.
Ansible and QRadar, better together — Ansible is the open and powerful language security teams can use to interoperate across the various security technologies involved in their day-to-day activities.
Ansible modules allow users to integrate QRadar in sophisticated security automated workflows through the automation of the following functionalities:
- Log sources configuration
- Offense rules enablement
- Offense management
Solution Benefits -
- Automate QRadar configuration deployments
- Access data sources programmatically to support investigation activities
- Enable and disable correlation rules through workflows for incidents prioritization
- Change the priority of an offense, change its ownership and track activities in it’s note field directly via Ansible
The IBM Security QRadar Ansible collections, available on Automation Hub, contain both modules and plugins to support response and remediation scenarios. The modules are also designed to accommodate multiple use cases, such as day 0 when you want to deploy a certain technology and subsequently connect it to IBM QRadar.
Ansible is a universal language, unraveling the mystery of how work gets done. Turn tough tasks into repeatable playbooks. Roll out enterprise-wide protocols with the push of a button.
Ansible and NASA
BUSINESS CHALLENGE FACED:
NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware
based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost
savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated
‘as-is’ to a cloud environment.
This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs)
and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like
ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple
patching, were extremely burdensome. Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.
As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team.
HCA Healthcare Uses Innovative Data Platform To Save Life
HCA Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare service providers in the United States, uses data and technology to support modern healthcare.
A cross-functional team of clinicians, data scientists, and technology professionals at HCA Healthcare used Red Hat solutions to create a real-time predictive analytics product system to more accurately and rapidly detect sepsis, a potentially life-threatening condition.
