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. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. 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 — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow us to describe any automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.
Why Do We Need Ansible?
No one likes repetitive tasks. With Ansible, IT admins can begin automating away the drudgery from their daily tasks. Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of time. allowing smart people to focus on smart things.
How does Ansible work?
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.
Applications of Ansible
👉 Configuration Management
👉 Application Deployment
👉 Orchestration
👉 Cloud Provisioning
👉 Security and Compliance
Companies using Ansible
1538 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks,
- LaunchDarkly.
- Tokopedia.
- ViaVarejo.
- trivago.
- Revolut.
- Alibaba Travels.
- Typeform.
- Pratilipi.
- etc.
Case Study Explained: “How NASA used ANSIBLE to migrate cloud and increase cloud efficiency?”
About NASA & WESTPrime
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration in short NASA is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Wikipedia
The NASA Web Enterprises Services and Technology contract (WESTPrime) was established to create a standard for public cloud usage within NASA. WESTPrime deals with everything from the very well known www.nasa.gov site to privately accessible web applications used by NASA staff around the world.
The Timeline
NASA began providing online access to photos, video, and audio in the early 2000’s when media capture began to shift from analog and film to digital. Before long, each of NASA’s 10 field centers was making its imagery available online, including digitized versions of some older assets.
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⬤ With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge…
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Therein was the challenge:
“With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge of NASA to know where to look,” says Rodney Grubbs, Imagery Experts Program Manager at NASA.
“If you wanted a video of the space shuttle launch, you had to go to the Kennedy Space Center website. If you wanted pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you went to the Goddard Space Flight Center website. With 10 different centers and dozens of distributed image collections, it took a lot of digging around to find what you wanted.”
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⬤ NASA was trying to get away from buying hardware and building data centers…
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By 2014, like with many government agencies, NASA was trying to get away from buying hardware and building data centers, which are expensive to build and manage. The cloud also provided the ability to scale with ease, as needed, paying for only the capacity we use instead of having to make a large up-front investment.
“We wanted to build our new solution in the cloud for two reasons,” says Grubbs.
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⬤ WESTPrime provided a delivery vehicle for building and managing the new site…
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The Web Enterprise Service Technologies (WESTPrime) service contract, one of five agency-wide service contracts under NASA’s Enterprise Services program, provided a delivery vehicle for building and managing the new site.
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⬤ Technology selection, solution design, and implementation were managed by…
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The development of the new NASA Image and Video Library was handled by the Web Services Office within NASA’s Enterprise Service and Integration Division. Technology selection, solution design, and implementation were managed by InfoZen, the WESTPrime contract service provider. As an Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), InfoZen chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“Amazon was the largest cloud services provider, had a strong government cloud presence, and offered the most suitable cloud in terms of elasticity,” recalls Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager at InfoZen.
Market Use Case Of Ansible
Red Hat’s Ansible enjoys the top slot in the adoption of DevOps tools. Among all respondents, Ansible has 41 percent adoption, followed by Chef and Puppet at 37 percent adoption. Interestingly, Terraform shows the most substantial growth since last year, up by 55 percent from 20 to 31 percent adoption.
