Ansible: Industrial Use Cases

Some of the possible orchestrations with ansible

Lets start with what ansible is: Ansible is an open-source (free to use for all for learning and developing) automation tool. It can be used to manage configurations, deployment of applications, orchestrating (integrating) multiple services and provisioning (setting up the IT infrastructure) and more just by writing a simple yaml code. To learn how to use ansible, click here to read its official documentation.

Ansible is written in python language, and if you’re interested in having a look at it’s source code, click here. For curious tech-minds, I would encourage a look at the code, it helps you understand the platform much better and gives you more to think about.

Now coming to why ansible is even worth writing or talking about, let’s see its Industrial Use case as an example. We’ll look at how NASA uses ansible.

ansible used by NASA

NASA needed to move lots of applications from the old hardware based data centers to the cloud in order to lower costs and provide better agility. The problem with doing it straightaway with AWS was, each application spanned over multiple VPCs (imagine it to be a computer but on the cloud, so you can’t see it but you can control it by logging in in it with your laptop) and multiple AWS accounts so they were hard to manage. The solution to this was using Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment (AWS in this case).

Now, ansible is majorly used in it’s CLI (command line interface) form, but ansible tower comes in a GUI form (a website where you can click the options you want instead of coding it)- which is more user friendly. This provides NASA with status summaries of all the hosts and jobs on a dashboard, allowing them to manage access permissions easily.

Needless to say, this helped NASA:

1. Get organization and clarity
2. Save time by remediating security issues
3. Update their website weekly, with an update taking just 5 minutes for the mobile and web version.
4. Organize their inventory by using Ansible facts (for database management- here AWS inventory)

As a result ansible helped NASA on multiple fronts, making it better suited to shift to a cloud environment and manage it with ease.