Ansible Case Study

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

Regardless of where you start with Ansible, you’ll find our simple, powerful and agentless automation platform has the capabilities to solve your most challenging problems.

Your apps have to live somewhere. If you’re PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible and Red Hat® Ansible® Tower help streamline the process.

Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.

When you define your application with Ansible, and manage the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.

Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.

When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.

Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.

The Power of AWS Meets Ansible Simplicity

Using Ansible to automate your applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success. The breadth of AWS capability enables IT organizations to dynamically provision entire workloads like never before. To harness this power, IT organizations must effectively answer:

Manage Cloud Like Cloud with Ansible

When you deploy an application into AWS, you will soon realize that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else's data center. You now have a fleet of services available to you to rapidly deploy and scale applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can help you manage your AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.

Ansible & AWS: Batteries included

From the beginning, Ansible has offered deep support for AWS. Ansible can be used to define, deploy, and manage a wide variety of AWS services. Even the most complicated of AWS environments can be easily described in Ansible playbooks. Once your AWS-based application environments are described with Ansible, you can deploy them again and again, easily scaling out to 100s or 1000s of instances across multiple regions, with the same results each and every time.

AMI Management
Autoscaling Groups
CloudFormation
CloudTrail
CloudWatch
DynamoDB
ElastiCache
Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
Elastic IPs (EIP)
Elastic Load Balancers (ELB)
Identity Access Manager (IAM)
Kinesis
Lambda
Relational Database Service
Route53
Security Groups
Security Token Service
Simple Storage Service (S3)
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Control Cloud Sprawl with Dynamic Inventory

Now that you have deployed applications into the cloud, how do you keep track of what you have? Keeping accurate track of deployed infrastructure is a critical part of ensuring security policies are always followed and systems are properly managed through their lifecycles. You don’t want to be paying for services you don’t need.

With Red Hat® Ansible® Tower's cloud inventory synchronization, you can know exactly what AWS instances you have no matter how they were launched. Simply enter your AWS credentials and your entire AWS infrastructure can be made available as resources to use in your Ansible automation jobs.

Safely Automating at the Speed of Business

When you only had one or two engineers working in AWS, everything seemed easy. Now that you’ve got ten or more, you need controls in place that restrict users’ ability to modify certain environments. Ansible Tower delivers with its extensive set of role-based access controls that ensures users will only have access to the AWS resources (networks, systems, security groups, etc.) that they require for their job. Plus, Ansible Tower encrypts credentials such as AWS and SSH keys so that you can delegate simple automation jobs to junior employees without giving out the keys.

Migrations Made Easy

Your CIO just mandated that you have to migrate dozens of workloads to AWS. With Ansible, you can use the same simple playbook language to manage your infrastructure and deploy your application. Use Ansible to define your application locally. Once you can repeatedly deploy that application locally, re-deploying it to a different infrastructure is as straightforward as defining your AWS environment, and then applying your application’s playbook. No more surprises.

Juniper Networks is an industry leader in network innovation. Juniper creates innovative technologies that help customers connect their ideas, compete and thrive in an ever-changing world.

Integrated Solution

The combination of Ansible and Juniper’s automation and orchestration tools bring together the knowledge and expertise of experienced IT solutions developers, operators, and administrators across organizations.

The joint solution addresses the most common applications of automation and orchestration in the management and provisioning of IT resources, including:

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.

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

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

Improve Speed and Agility

Improve your application build pipeline

The speed and quality of your application delivery is essential to your business. Splunk provides the leading operational intelligence platform that makes machine data accessible, usable, and valuable to everyone. Ansible is the IT automation engine that helps you end repetitive tasks, speed productivity and scale your efforts.

The Ansible Tower integration for Splunk

This real-time visibility improves the speed, quality and business impact of your application build pipeline.

Get More Out of Your Ansible Tower Data

Let’s consider an example where your Ops team is using Ansible Tower for configuration management and application deployment, and the Splunk platform is used to analyze machine data from on-prem and public cloud infrastructure. What if you could access all your Ansible data in the Splunk platform? What new insights could you gain about your deployments and processes?

The Ansible Tower Integration for Splunk will give you the ability to provide real-time operational visibility into your deployments:

Who launched a job?

What credentials were used?

When did the job complete, and how long did it take?

What changed - or was not changed - in your environment?

The machine data provided by Ansible Tower into the Splunk platform enable greater control and visibility. The Splunk platform will collect, analyze and act upon Ansible Tower data generated by your infrastructure and business applications delivery pipeline. Through analyzing this data, it becomes easier to identify correlation between deployments and hosts.

Teams using Ansible Tower in combination with Splunk will find many other ways to leverage this new data set within the Splunk platform.

Automate Microsoft Azure simply

Chances are teams in your organization are already successfully deploying workloads in public cloud. As more new applications are built natively for the cloud, IT leaders are looking for ways to deliver a consistent customer experience and management strategy across cloud and on-premise applications. The good news - if your IT teams are already using Ansible to describe on-premise infrastructure and applications, then you can easily use these descriptions to automate the same workloads in Microsoft Azure.

Azure supports customers’ push to hybrid cloud in the areas of infrastructure, user identity and management. Using Ansible to automate these Azure services gives organizations the flexibility to run workloads where they best make sense.

Automate once, Deploy anywhere

Once you use Ansible to define your application locally, you can repeatedly deploy and redeploy the application. Re-deploying it to a different infrastructure is as straightforward as defining your Azure environment and then applying your application’s Playbook. No more surprises. Because of its power and flexibility, Ansible ensures your Azure deployments work seamlessly in a hybrid cloud configuration as easily as you build a single system.

Windows, Linux, Services, Networks AND MORE

Azure hosts a lot more than just Windows, and thankfully Ansible automates it all. Ansible has been designed for cloud deployments from the beginning, and Ansible easily allows you to provision a variety of Azure cloud services. Whether you’re building a simple 3-tier application, or a complicated set of virtual private clouds, services, and applications, your Azure environments can be described in Ansible Playbooks, and then scaled out across regions.

Ansible has modules for many different Azure capabilities, including:

Virtual Machines

Virtual Networks

Storage and Storage Accounts

Resource Groups

Security Groups

Resource Manager Templated Deployments

Ansible also has hundreds and hundreds of additional modules that help you manage every aspect of your Linux, Windows, UNIX, network infrastructure, and applications - regardless of where they're deployed.

Automating in Azure at Scale

Ansible Tower helps teams who use Ansible with an extensive set of role-based access controls that ensures users will only have access to the Azure resources (networks, systems, security groups, etc.) that are required for their job. Plus, Ansible Tower encrypts credentials such as Azure and SSH keys so that you can delegate simple automation jobs to junior employees without giving out the (literal) keys to the kingdom.

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