Ansible Industry Use Cases
Automation is not an option anymore, it is a core Fundamental aspect that we cannot avoid!!
Ansible is one of the demanding tool today. Automation is going to take over the complete IT industry. There are many features of Ansible that made it so popular in the Market, some of those features are:
- Simplicity and Flexibility
- Easy to use
- Modules
- Plugins
- Inventories
- Security and Compliance
These are some unique features of Ansible.
When it comes to use cases, so Ansible solved a lot of use cases but before that lets see that it can work with an ample of latest tools and technologies.
From this picture, we can conclude that it have covered different different fields either it is Monitoring, Cloud, Network etc. It helped to solve a lot of Industry use cases that resulted in the Centralized configuration Management and Deployment.
Lets see some major use cases that Ansible works on, that are:
Provisioning Systems
From traditional bare metal through to serverless or function-as-a-service, automating the provisioning of any infrastructure is the first step in automating the operational life cycle of your applications. Ansible can provision the latest cloud platforms, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices and bare-metal servers.
Provisioning with Ansible allows you to seamlessly transition into configuration management, orchestration and application Development using the same simple, human readable, automation language.
Configuration Management
Earlier if we have a requirement to Configure a system as per the requirements, we need to know its prerequisites like what commands it support or what version does it have!! like to get the IP configuration we use ifconfig in Linux OS whereas we use ipconfig in Windows OS. So this kind of situation sometimes creates a mess.
But through Ansible we can configure any system with any specification easily with the help of great modules in Ansible. We can think like it is the power house of Ansible — the modules.
Ansible provide configuration management with below mentioned features:
- Goal Oriented, non Scripted
- Secure and Agentless
App Deployment
Ansible is the simplest way to deploy your applications. It gives you the power to deploy multi-tier applications reliably and consistently, all from one common framework. You can configure needed services as well as push application artifacts from one common system.
Rather than writing custom code to automate your systems, your team writes simple task descriptions that even the newest team member can understand on first read — saving not only up-front costs, but making it easier to react to change over time. This all possible with the power of Playbooks.
Features of Playbooks are:
- Repeatable & Reliable
- Simple to write & maintain
- Secure
- Easy to use
- Requires less efforts
Continuous Delivery
With Ansible, it is very easy to setup a continuous delivery based architecture. Ansible provides true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration. Ansible’s push-based architecture allows very fine-grained control over operations, able to orchestrate configuration of servers in batches, all while working with load balancers, monitoring systems, and cloud or web services.
It provide simple integrations. One common way to use Ansible is by calling it from a continuous integration (CI) system upon a successful application build:
- The CI asks Ansible to run a playbook that deploys a staging environment with the application.
- When the stage tests pass, it might then be asked to run a production deployment.
- Ansible can check out your artifacts from version control on each machine, or pull artifacts from the CI server, or from a package mirror.
Hence Ansible is capable to solve a large no. of use cases also it could be integrated with different tools like notification tools, version control, Infrastructure, Operating Systems etc.
