Ansible Case Study: How Industries use Ansible to solve their problems

In this blog, we will discuss how Ansible helps to solve the industry's problem but first, we need to understand what is 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. Automation is crucial these days, with IT environments that are too complex and often need to scale too quickly for system administrators and developers to keep up if they had to do everything manually. Automation simplifies complex tasks, not just making developers’ jobs more manageable but allowing them to focus attention on other tasks that add value to an organization. In other words, it frees up time and increases efficiency.

In simple words, Ansible is a configuration management tool that is used to manage different servers at the same time.

Why industry use Ansible?

Ansible requires no additional agents or security infrastructure and can be used for multi-tiered deployments as efficiently as possible. It is one of the simplest IT automation technology in the industry.

 So let's get started and let's see how some companies use Ansible :

• CISCO

CISCO SYSTEMS INC. IS THE WORLDWIDE LEADER in networking for the Internet. Cisco's networking solutions connect people, computing devices, and computer networks, allowing people to access or transfer information without regard to differences in time, place, or type of computer system.

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

Cisco Nexus NX-OS combined with the scaling and performance capabilities enables customers to build efficient data centers.

So where the role of Ansible comes into play?

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

How does Ansible Work?

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

What benefits CISCO gets after using Ansible?

• Speed IT Transformation

• Leverage Open Ecosystem

• Efficient Operational Model

• Faster Adoption

• Improve Speed and Agility

• NASA: 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.

What was the challenge faced by NASA?

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.

The solution that NASA finds out:

Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.

What was the outcome of the solution?

As a result of implementing the 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.

By the numbers:

• Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
• Provisioning OS Accounts across the entire environment in under 10 minutes
•  Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
• Application stack set up from 1-2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.

NASA says about Ansible:

“Ansible Tower has

allowed us to provide

better operations and

security to our clients.

It has also increased our

efficiency as a team.”

• Swisscom:

Why Swisscom needed Ansible?

To stay competitive in the challenging network infrastructure market, Swisscom needed a tool for enterprise-wide IT and network automation. With help from Red Hat, a trusted vendor, the service provider used Red Hat Ansible Tower to automate the management of around 15,000 components, including servers, firewalls, network devices, and storage devices. Ansible Tower’s self-service provisioning and role-based access capabilities also help Swisscom’s teams focus on more valuable development projects and accelerate response times for resource requests.

Swisscom says:

“We chose Ansible Tower partly because it’s

easy to use and learn. You can make very fast

progress compared to other configuration

management tools. We also liked that it has a

large and rich API [application programming

interface] we can use to integrate with

other tools.”

Benifits Swisscom got after using Ansible:

• Anticipated saving approximately 3,000 hours per year in manual operating system tasks
• Implemented self-service capabilities for IT tasks, simplifying and accelerating common tasks
• Improved collaboration with standardized playbooks and monthly sync meetings

BOJAN NIKOLIC HEAD OF I.T. SERVICE DELIVERY SWISSCOM says:

“We can combine, centralize, and share our Ansible Playbooks with the application and database teams, for example, improving quality and standardization. For example, an applications expert doesn’t have to write an operating system patch playbook, something that’s outside their area of expertise, resulting in fewer errors and therefore fewer outages.”

THANK YOU!!!❄