How industries are solving challenges using Ansible

Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.

ANSIBLE USE CASES :

1.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 on automation, innovation, and consistency.Integrate your applications into your customer’s existing DevOps tools chainImprove 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

2.ANSIBLE IS GLUE FOR VMWARE AND DEVOPS

Chances are VMware isn’t your only infrastructure tool. With Ansible’s extensive list of integrations and capabilities, you’ll be able to model nearly any process in your IT organization, and you can use the same tools you have today.

Over half of our customers are using Ansible on VMware today, and they’re using it to glue together complicated workflows that encompass (for instance) a physical network, build systems such as Jenkins or Bamboo, a monitoring service, and finally, a firewall and load balancer — all while ensuring everything is configured exactly the right way each and every time. And when you’re ready to go hybrid, Ansible’s broad support for cloud providers is ready.

AUTOMATE VSPHERE, EXTEND CAPABILITIES OF VREALIZE AUTOMATION

Out of the box, Ansible ships with over 50 VMware modules supporting most use cases, including:

• Managing vSphere datacenters, clusters, hosts and guests
• VM template and snapshot management
• vSwitches, DNS settings, firewall rules and NAT gateway rules

Ansible also ships with integrations to support physical network devices for all leading vendors. Additionally, NSX modules are available for teams looking to automate network virtualization.

Many VMware customers use vRealize Automation (vRA) to automate the provisioning of VMs, and would prefer to use Ansible Tower for orchestration and application deployment. Through a partnership with SovLabs, the power of Ansible Tower is now accessible from vRA, enabling advanced provisioning and ongoing Day 2 management functions. The combination of vRA and Ansible Tower expands the scope of possible automation for customers — in a manner that is faster and simpler than was previously possible.

3.HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite is a social media management system used by businesses and organizations. It allows the execution of social media campaigns on a variety of networks from a secure dashboard. Hootsuite is popular among Fortune 1000 companies.

The main challenge facing Hootsuite was the lack of repeatability. This made automating Hootsuite’s infrastructure a challenge, and Hootsuite were also facing difficulties in application deployment.

To resolve this, Hootsuite introduced Ansible core. This allowed Hootsuite to build servers from scratch and enabled repeatability. In the future, Hootsuite plans to implement an Ansible migration of its app deployment and possibly in ad hoc production server management.

Since performing their Ansible migration, Hootsuite says ops and devs ‘feel safer’. Additionally, Ansible allows developers to repeatedly test server builds on a local level until the team can be sure they work.

Hootsuite intends to use Ansible in many other ways, and as Beier Cai, Director of Technology, Hootsuite Media Inc., explains, “In the beginning I didn’t realize Ansible is good for orchestration as well but found it out quickly and I really loved it as it beats competitors right there.”

THANK YOU