Hello everybody and welcome. In this presentation, I’ll explain to you what is Ansible and why it is so powerful for your IT department.
I hope you’ll be excited because I have prepared for you a great agenda for today. We will begin with the three main use cases: provisioning, config management, and app deployment, then we’ll talk about the four key tenets of Ansible. We'll move forward to the six main advantages of Ansible and explore a bit of the history. We’ll finish comparing Ansible and Ansible Tower products.
First of all, Ansible let’s begin our adventure with the fabulous Open Source technology named Ansible. It is classified as an Infrastructure Automation tool, so you could automate your System Administrator tasks very easily. Ansible follows the DevOps principles. With Ansible you could deploy your infrastructure as code on-premise and on the most well-known public cloud provider.
The three main use cases of Ansible are provision, configuration management, and app deployment. But after touching the technology I’m sure you could invent some more ways to use it!
Let’s start talking about provisioning: all the System Administrator know how important is to manage a uniform fleet of machines. Some people still rely on software to create workstation images. But there is a drawback, with imaging technology you’re only taking a snapshot in time of the machine So every time you need to reinstall software because of the modern key activation systems or update manually to the latest security patches. Ansible is very powerful to automate this process being able to create a more smooth process.
The second key use case is “configuration management”: maintain up-to-date and in a consistent way all your fleet, coordinating rolling updates and scheduling downtimes. With Ansible you could verify the status of your managed hosts and take action in a small group of them. A huge variety of modules is available for the most common use cases. Not to mention the common use case to check the compliance of your fleet to some international standard.
The third key use case where Ansible is useful is App deployment. It could automate the continuous integration / continuous delivery workflow pipeline of your web application for example. Your DevOps team will be delighted!.
Ansible is used to apply the DevOps principles in worldwide organizations.
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). As DevOps is intended to be a cross-functional mode of working, those who practice the methodology use different sets of tools referred to as "toolchains" rather than a single one. These toolchains are expected to fit into one or more of the following categories, reflective of key aspects of the development and delivery process. The seven categories:
Code: code development and review, source code management tools, code merging.
Build: continuous integration tools, build status.
Test: continuous testing tools that provide quick and timely feedback on business risks.
Release: artifact repository, application pre-deployment staging.
Deploy: change management, release approvals, release automation.
Operate: infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as code tools.
Monitor: applications performance monitoring, end-user experience.
The four key tenets of ansible are: declarative, agentless, idempotent, and community-driven. With “declarative” it means that you could use in a way very similar to a programming language apply sequencing, selection, and iteration to the code flow. With “agentless” it means that you don’t need to install and update any agents on the target machine, it uses the SSH connection and python interpreter. The language itself is “idempotent”, which means that the code will check a precise status on the managed machine. It means that for example the first time your code will change something, the following runs probably it only very that nothing changed and move forward. The last tenet is “community-driven”, which means that exists a public archive colled “Ansible Galaxy” where you could download the code made by other open source contributors. This code is organized in roles and collections, but we’ll see it in the future.
Now let’s talk about the six values of Ansible. The first is that is “simple: the code is written in YAML language, that is a human-readable data serialization language. It is well known and easy to learn, it is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. Ansible is Powerful, it is battle-tested as Configuration management, workflow orchestration, application deployment. The third value is “cross-platform” by nature, the Agentless support for all major Operating Systems, physical, virtual, cloud, and network provider. Another value of Ansible is that it works with existing tools, it easy to homogenize the existing environment. The “batteries included” means that Ansible included bundled more than 750 modules to automate the most common tasks. The last value is that Ansible is “community-powered”, every month has more than 250.000 downloads, an average of 3500 contributors, and more than 1200 users on IRC.
The main events in Ansible history are the following.
The first release of Ansible was public on the 20th of February 2012. The Ansible tool was developed by Michael DeHaan. Ansible Inc., originally AnsibleWorks Inc., was the company set up to commercially support and sponsor the project.
On the 16th of October 2015 acquired Ansible Inc., a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT.
AnsibleFest is an annual conference of the Ansible community of users, contributors since 2016 in London and the USA.
Ansible is a community-driven project with fast-moving innovations Open Source but only command-line tools.
Enterprise needs more services and some stable releases. For example, they need an SLA for support. Red Hat offers this service to companies namely under the Ansible Tower umbrella, now rebranded as Ansible Automation Platform.
Ansible Tower is a REST API, web service, and web-based console designed to make Ansible more usable for IT teams with members of different technical proficiencies and skillsets. It is a hub for automation tasks. The tower is a commercial product supported by Red Hat Inc. but derived from AWX upstream project, which is open source since September 2017.
Red Hat maintains also Ansible Engine. With Ansible Engine, organizations can access the tools and innovations available from the underlying Ansible technology in a hardened, enterprise-grade manner. Ansible Engine is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an enterprise IT platform.
Thank you for listening to me and keep in contact. Have a great day!
