How industries are solving challenges using Ansible.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling Infrastructure as code. In simple words, it’s an automation engine that is simple yet very powerful.

Ansible can be installed on many Unix-like systems (Linux), and you can configure any Unix-like systems and Microsoft Windows system by using Ansible.

The best thing about Ansible is that it is Agentless means you don’t need to install any program on the managed nodes/hosts. Isn’t that amazing? You need the ssh connectivity on the managed node, and that’s it. Although there are other ways also available for connectivity to managed hosts, ssh is preferred.

Why was Ansible created in the first place?

In big MNCs, there are thousands of servers that need to be configured daily. Now imagine how tiresome and time-consuming it would have been if you had to go and configure that each server manually. And that’s why Ansible was created. Ansible allows you to configure multiple nodes at one time from one single controller using Infrastructure as code.

The server that has Ansible installed is known as the Control node, while the remote hosts/servers configured are known as Managed nodes.

But how does Ansible do it?

Ansible uses Declarative language which means you just need to tell it What to do and not how to do it. Ansible uses RAL underline which stands for Resource Abstraction Layer, which means you can configure the target systems without worrying about the implementation details and the other internal working.

In Ansible, you have two approaches to configure things:-

1. Ad-hoc commands (Command-line)
2. Playbooks

Usually, we write playbooks in Ansible to configure things. In playbooks, we write everything that needs to be configured on remote servers known as tasks. The playbook contains three things:- 1) Name of the play 2) Hosts 3)Tasks. The format used for writing playbooks is YAML.

The remote servers or hosts which need to be configured are mentioned in the Inventory. There are two types of Inventory:- 1) Static Inventory 2)Dynamic Inventory. We use dynamic Inventory if our hosts are running on top of the cloud or in a container engine where the hosts are up and down frequently.

The magic of the Ansible lies in its Modules. There are currently over 750+ modules present in Ansible for almost everything from cloud configuration, network devices configuration to container’s configuration. It is because ansible is opensource and very much community driven.

Now let’s sum up the key points we have seen till now about Ansible:-

1. Agentless
2. Declarative language
3. Inventory
4. Modules
5. Simple to learn

So now that we know a little about Ansible, let’s see some of the Industry use cases for Ansible.

Use-cases of Ansible

A) Provisioning environments:- Suppose you have a web app that you need to deploy and you need the environment for that so Ansible can provision environments for you on various platforms like Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and even Baremetal.

B) Configuring servers:- The Ansible is used mainly for this purpose which is configuration management. In companies, you need to configure the servers daily for various purposes like hosting the website. So Ansible can configure your servers as per requirement and start the services for you with just one click.

C) Firewall configurations:- With Ansible, you can create firewall rules and apply them to multiple hosts to ensure that your servers are secure and only required ports are open and listening.

D) Security Patches:- The updates and security patches are very important to make sure that your servers are protected against the latest cyber-attacks. With Ansible, you can ensure that all your packages are the latest and apply security patches to your servers.

E) Application deployment:- With Ansible, you can automate the process of application deployment easily and fastly.

Managing an organization’s many tools and business processes is becoming increasingly complicated as technology expands. Whether your teams are performing their weekly system reboot or looking to configure instances to the desired state, it’s no secret that automation is critical to increasing speed, efficiency, productivity, and accuracy. Listed below are several instances1 where automation can help across your enterprise.

• Weekly system reboot: There’s nothing worse than doing the same thing for 8 hours a day.Eliminate repetitive, manual processes with automation.
• Enforce security guidelines: Rules are rules. It’s best to automate in an effort to achieve strict security standards.
• Monitor configuration drift: Use check mode with Ansible tasks to enforce desired settings and see if your configuration has drifted.
• Disaster recovery: Disaster recovery can involve a wide range of components. Act across different variables of the technology stack to identify problems and eliminate cross team dependencies.
• Command blaster: Remarkably easy to write, you can run commands across your environment for any number of servers.
• Database binary patching: Several databases use outdated binary sets. Patch the binaries in accordance with the release of the latest patch.
• Instance provisioning: Use modules for several cloud providers to create new instances and tailor their configuration.
• Service license agreements: Mistakes cost time and money. Eliminate errors that can crop up in detailed software contracts.

Ansible’s Features and Capabilities:-

1. Configuration Management

Ansible is designed to be very simple, reliable, and consistent for configuration management. If you’re already in IT, you can get up and running with it very quickly. Ansible configurations are simple data descriptions of Infrastructure and are both readable by humans and parsable by machines. All you need to start managing systems is a password or an SSH (Secure Socket Shell, a network protocol) key. An example of how easy Ansible makes configuration management: If you want to install an updated version of a specific type of software on all the machines in your enterprise, all you have to do is write out all the IP addresses of the nodes (also called remote hosts) and write an Ansible playbook to install it on all the nodes, then run the playbook from your control machine.

2. Application Deployment

Ansible lets you quickly and easily deploy multitier apps. You won’t need to write custom code to automate your systems; you list the tasks required to be done by writing a playbook, and Ansible will figure out how to get your systems to the state you want them to be in. In other words, you won’t have to configure the applications on every machine manually. When you run a playbook from your control machine, Ansible uses SSH to communicate with the remote hosts and run all the commands (tasks).

3. Orchestration

As the name suggests, orchestration involves bringing different elements into a beautifully run whole operation — similar to the way a musical conductor brings the notes produced by all the different instruments into a cohesive artistic work. For example, with application deployment, you need to manage not just the front-end and backend services but the databases, networks, storage, and so on. You also need to make sure that all the tasks are handled in the proper order. Ansible uses automated workflows, provisioning, and more to make orchestrating tasks easy. And once you’ve defined your Infrastructure using the Ansible playbooks, you can use that same orchestration wherever you need to, thanks to the portability of Ansible playbooks.

4. Security and Compliance

As with application deployment, sitewide security policies (such as firewall rules or locking down users) can be implemented along with other automated processes. If you configure the security details on the control machine and run the associated playbook, all the remote hosts will automatically be updated with those details. That means you won’t need to monitor each device for security compliance continually manually. And for extra security, an admin’s user ID and password aren’t retrievable in plain text on Ansible.

5. Cloud Provisioning

The first step in automating your applications’ life cycle is automating the provisioning of your Infrastructure. With Ansible, you can provision cloud platforms, virtualized hosts, network devices, and bare-metal servers.

let us learn the Ansible architecture.

Advantages of Ansible:-

Free: Ansible is an open-source tool.

• Very simple to set up and use: No special coding skills are necessary to use Ansible’s playbooks (more on playbooks later).
• Powerful: Ansible lets you model even highly complex IT workflows.
• Flexible: You can orchestrate the entire application environment no matter where it’s deployed. You can also customize it based on your needs.
• Agentless: You don’t need to install any other software or firewall ports on the client systems you want to automate. You also don’t have to set up a separate management structure.
• Efficient: Because you don’t need to install any extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.

Next, in our path to understanding what Ansible is, let us find out the features and capabilities of Ansible.

Ansible Architecture:-

Now let’s talk a bit about the pieces that make up the Ansible environment.

1. Modules

Modules are like small programs that Ansible pushes out to all the nodes or remote hosts from a control machine. The modules are executed using playbooks (see below), and they control things such as services, packages, and files. Ansible executes all the modules for installing updates or whatever the required task is and then removes them when finished. Ansible provides more than 450 modules for everyday tasks.

2. Plugins

As you probably already know from many other tools and platforms, plugins are extra pieces of code that augment functionality. Ansible comes with a number of its plugins, but you can write your own as well. Action, cache, and callback plugins are three examples.

3. Inventories

All the machines you’re using with Ansible (the control machine plus nodes) are listed in a single simple file, along with their IP addresses, databases, servers, and so on. Once you register the Inventory, you can assign variables to any of the hosts using a simple text file. You can also pull Inventory from sources like EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud).

4. Playbooks

Ansible playbooks are like instruction manuals for tasks. They are simple files written in YAML, which stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language, a human-readable data serialization language. Playbooks are really at the heart of what makes Ansible so popular is because they describe the tasks to be done quickly and without the need for the user to know or remember any particular syntax. Not only can they declare configurations, but they can orchestrate the steps of any manually ordered task, and can execute tasks at the same time or at different times.

Each playbook is composed of one or multiple plays, and the goal of a play is to map a group of hosts to well-defined roles, represented by tasks.

5. APIs

Various APIs (application programming interfaces) are available so you can extend Ansible’s connection types (meaning more than just SSH for transport), callbacks, and more.

Now that we’ve come this far to understand what Ansible is, let us next look into the Ansible tower.

What is Ansible Tower??

Ansible Tower is Red Hat’s commercial web-based solution for managing Ansible. Its best-known feature is an easy-to-use UI (user interface) for managing configurations and deployments, which is a significant improvement over the original UI. Ansible Tower contains the essential features of Ansible, especially those that are easier to see in a graphical format rather than a text-based format. It is free for up to 10 nodes.

As we are learning more about what is Ansible, let us learn the several advantages of Ansible.

Advantages of Using Ansible With Docker:-

Ansible does a great job of automating Docker and operationalizing the process of building and deploying containers. If you’re managing a traditional IT system, for example, it can be hard to add container-tooling functionality. But Ansible removes the need to do processes manually. There are four main advantages of using Ansible with Docker:

1. Portability/Flexibility

The fact that Ansible playbooks are portable, meaning they can be used anywhere, as well as repeatable, can save you a lot of time and effort. For example, if you use a pure Dockerfile to build a container, then you can reproduce the application only in a Docker container. If you use an Ansible playbook to create a container, on the other hand, then you can reproduce the application in Docker, on the cloud, and so on.

2. Auditability

Even if you create containers, you’ll still need to monitor code and track vulnerabilities. Using Ansible with Docker, you can easily track who has deployed which containers as well as what’s in all of the containers, and know that you can rebuild any containers as necessary.

3. Management of Entire Environments

With Ansible, you already know you can manage your Docker containers. But you can also maintain the environment that all the containers are in, even in highly complex environments. Ansible can monitor containers and non-container at the same time, which is essential because containerized applications often need to “talk” with noncontainerized applications.

4. Similar Syntax

As mentioned, Ansible used YAML files for its playbooks. Docker uses its non-YAML scripts, but they are very similar and can do almost the same things.

In order to get a complete understanding of what Ansible is, we will learn how Ansible can be used with Docker.

How to Use Ansible With Docker??

Docker is a Linux-based open-source platform used to help automate the deployment of applications within software containers. (A container is a unit of software in which code and all of its dependencies are packaged together; setting up software this way helps an application run reliably and consistently in multiple computing environments.)

Managing Docker Containers Using Ansible Modules:-

Ansible has several modules for managing Docker; a few of these are docker_image, docker_container, and docker_service. Docker_image is used for building, loading, or removing images and also for tagging and archiving images. Docker_container lets you create and destroy Docker containers, as well as start, stop, and update them. Docker_service assists in starting, shutting down, and scaling services. As updates are continually being made to both Ansible and Docker, look for the most recent list of modules and their functions, along with system requirements and more, in the Ansible guide to working with Docker.

Ansible Consulting Services:-

A Transition Towards Simple, Efficient, Agile IT Automation:-

With the rapid digital transformation, the IT complexity increases over time, making tasks even more convoluted. So, with the growing business demands, IT firms are struggling hard to develop, deploy, and maintain sprawling systems. In need of an hour, Ansible came to the aid of the entire IT and DevOps team in scaling automation, managing complex deployments, and enhancing productivity.

So, if you are looking to create and standardize centralized automation practices that add business value and build a strong foundation for DevOps, then you are at the right place!!

No matter where you stand on your DevOps, Ansible automation can help.

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