ANSIBLE: Industry use case
Ansible -
Ansible is a automation tool for configuration management . In IT industry we have to do multiple setup of software and any other things to do like service start and all. doing all these things doing manually will be time consuming . so to tackle this problem Redhat come up with a product called ansible that is enough intelligent to do all these things in less time .
benefits of ansible:
No need to remember the command:
The big benefit of ansible is that , using it we don’t need to remember any command of any OS, let’s we want to install a software in ubuntu OS, so with ansible we don’t need to know which command is to be used to install any software. ansible install the respective software without knowing us the commands. this feature of ansible is called RAL(Resource Abstraction Layer).
Idempotence :
ansible works on the Idempotence feature , means if any task assigned to ansible has been done . then ansible will not do that task again.
Agentless:
We 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. means no agent is needed in ansible.
Companies using Ansible: -
Almost 9000 companies that use Ansible. The companies using Ansible are most often found in United States and in the Computer Software industry. Ansible is most often used by companies with 50–200 employees and 10M-50M dollars in revenue. This data for Ansible usage goes back as far as 3 years and 5 months.
Let’s talk about SWISSCOM:
Swisscom, Switzerland’s leading telecommunications company and one of its leading IT companies, is headquartered in Ittigen, close to the capital city Bern. Swisscom’s international activities are concentrated mainly in Italy, where its subsidiary Fastweb is one of the biggest broadband providers. About 20,000 employees generated sales of CHF 5.8 billion in the first half of 2018. Swisscom is one of the most sustainable companies in Switzerland and Europe.
what they want:
To continue to successfully operate in highly competitive markets, Swisscom constantly seeks ways to reduce costs, work more efficiently, and speed response times. As part of these ongoing efforts, the company sought to automate management of its IT processes, systems, and components.
“We have a lot of different network platforms across different datacenters, but we didn’t have a central automation solution,” said Bojan Nikolic, head of IT service delivery at Swisscom. “Our approach was based on scripts, using different closed-source tools for different platforms, and we were looking for something more centralized.”
Deal with RedHat:
From RedHat they chose Ansible Tower partly because it’s easy to use and learn. You can make very fast progress compared to other configuration management tools, It has a large and rich API to integrate with other tools. this help in several use cases, especially in regards to self-service capabilities, where the API will be very helpful. Another factor to use it was that Ansible Tower is agentless, so they don’t need to deploy and maintain agents on each endpoint.
ease with Ansible:
Swisscom deployed Ansible Tower for automation and orchestration across multiple environments with different network configurations. After production implementation is complete, five teams of 80 users will use Ansible to automate management of about 15,000 components, such as servers, firewalls, network devices, and storage devices. For example, the team responsible for Swisscom TV infrastructure services uses Ansible Tower to automate and orchestrate radio stations and monitoring of its OpenStack platform.
SPEEDING WORK WITH MORE EFFICIENT PROCESSES:
Swisscom anticipates that the automation capabilities provided by Ansible Tower will save an estimated average of 3,000 hours of operations management time per year. Automating manual tasks will free its engineers to focus on developing new, innovative projects instead of repetitive work, generating further time savings.
In addition, streamlining routine manual tasks helps Swisscom scale its products and services to meet changing demand with the same amount of staff. Request response times are significantly faster, with time to deploy reduced from hours to minutes.
“With our current deployment, we can save many operation hours and invest the time of our engineers in more valuable tasks,” said Nikolic. “For networking, we have a lot of different zones. Ansible Tower helps us with the group instances feature, so we can deploy small satellites and reach all of our servers from one dashboard.”
MORE EFFECTIVE COLLABORATION:
With unified automation and orchestration through Ansible Tower, Swisscom’s various teams can now better collaborate on shared projects.
Ansible Tower also lets Swisscom’s teams define specific inventories for running playbooks and give access to other teams or employees to run processes on servers, without requiring local server access. As a result, teams can focus on their core work, and tasks are completed more accurately.
thanks for reading the blog !!!
keep in touch…