How Ansible is being used by industries in solving different challenges?

First of all , I would like to give light on the Ansible itself that will cover some of the basic questions about ansible and its use cases.

Why Ansible?

Working in IT we are likely doing the same tasks over and over. What if we could solve problems once and then automate our solutions going forward?

Automation is an essential and strategic component of modernization and digital transformation. Modern, dynamic environments need a new type of management solution that can improve speed, scale and stability across the enterprise IT environment.

No matter the complexity of your environment or where you are on your IT modernization journey, an IT operations automation strategy can help you improve existing processes. With automation, you can save time, increase quality, improve employee satisfaction, and reduce costs throughout your organization.

BENEFITS OF AUTOMATION

Team impact

• Save time and be more productive
• Eliminate repetitive tasks
• Fewer mistakes & errors
• Improve collaboration and job satisfaction

Enterprise Impact

• Overcome complexity
• More resources for innovation
• Increase accountability and compliance

Now Let’s move in the world of automation !! And let’s see how industries is getting benefitted in solving challenges using ansible ..

NASA’s Business Challenge

NASA WESTPRIME’s initial focus was to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center in a rapid time-line to a cloud-based environment. The rapid time-line resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. This allowed for NASA to gain significant cost savings from the change in infrastructure but did not allow for immediate cloud optimization of the applications and sites. As a result of the rapid migration requirement we had an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. This resulted in scenarios where even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.

After Using Ansible

As a result of implementing Ansible we are better equipped to manage our environment. Ansible has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our eficiency as a team.

• www.nasa.gov update window went from over 1 hour, to 5 minutes or less
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to a 45 minute process
• Near real-time RAM and Disk monitoring accomplished without agents
• OS Account provisioning across entire environment in less than 10 minutes
• Baselining our standard AMI’s went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible background process
• Application Stacks went from 1–2 hours to set up, to about 10 minutes per stack

Amelco’s Business Challenge

Amelco is a producer of cutting-edge technology solutions for the betting industry and wider financial markets. Based on a multi-tiered architecture running on VMware, customers can mix and match the financial betting or trading modules that best suit their business model. With over 400 VMware nodes operating on Linux-based Ubuntu, each customized for its extensive customer base, deploying applications quickly and efficiently across these different environments proved a challenge. Having very defined customer service level agreements (SLAs), Amelco specifically sought a solution that would also minimize downtime.

After using ansible

Ansible solution benefits:

Adoption took a day or less, not weeks. An upside benefit that could be quickly passed on to customers

• Faster time to deployment for its bespoke and modular client solutions, resulting in speedier time to market and higher customer satisfaction

• A simplified and repeatable deployment process, leveraging true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration that minimized the complex dependencies of heterogeneous environments

• Ansible Tower functionality created self-service IT, offering a better utilization of team resources

• Powerful automation capabilities ensure continuous delivery, reducing downtime and ensuring performance against SLAs

BRITISH ARMY’S CHALLENGE

Due to problems with support, performance, and availability, the British Army’s IAS Branch needed to migrate from its Oracle private cloud environment. The system caused unplanned downtime during upgrades, disrupted users, and slowed update deployment. “There’s always pressure to deliver quickly,” said Lt. Col. Dorian Seabrook, head of operations at the British Army’s IAS Branch. “We have to be more efficient in how we deliver software, as well as underlying infrastructure, upgrades, maintenance, and support.”

After Using Ansible

With the new system, IAS gained easier, more accurate management, cutting patching time and significantly reducing launch errors and configuration issues. Also, upgrades that previously took a day — and caused hours of system downtime each month — can now be performed in less than 2 hours with high availability. Overall, change delivery is now typically 75% faster.

“Rather than bulk delivery, we’re able to deliver incrementally, and we no longer frustrate users with significant downtime during working hours,” said Seabrook.

MICROSOFT USING ANSIBLE

Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working with Red Hat Consulting, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity.

“Digital transformation is really changing the way that we think about how we solve problems,” said Dworak. “In the past, we had to manually do the same deployment again and again. With Ansible, we can create blueprints to deploy it multiple times. And every time we deploy, it’s exactly the same.”

SIEMENS USING ANSIBLE

Siemens, a global technology company, uses public key infrastructure (PKI) technology to secure communications internally and with third-party partners and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. To simplify and better automate its PKI environment, Siemens worked closely with Red Hat Consulting to replace its legacy automation solution with Red Hat Ansible Automation. With expert support and training, Siemens’ PKI team is now using Ansible on Windows to automate manual management tasks and improve communications security across the business.

BENEFITS :

• Optimized Ansible for Windows-based security environment
• Improved IT efficiency by automating management tasks and adopting continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) approach
• Enhanced in-house Ansible expertise with dedicated, expert consulting and training

Instead of everyone doing things their own way if there is something generic that will be useful for all of Siemens, like hardening and patching, Ansible Tower runs a playbook that everyone uses.

Mohamed Ghaleb
Program Manager

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.

Thank you