ANSIBLE TOWER AND ITS INDUSTRY USE CASE

AUTOMATION:

Automation is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver goods and services with minimal human intervention. The implementation of automation technologies, techniques and processes improve the efficiency, reliability, and speed of many tasks that were previously performed by humans.

Advantages:

• Improve operating efficiencies
• Can Improve safety and remove risk of human error
• Can enable a shorter working week
• More efficient production
• Avoid Boring , repetitive jobs & many more

Ansible:

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management to do its tasks.

Features:

• Human readable automation
• No special coding skills needed
• Tasks executed in order
• Get productive quickly

Used for:

• Configuration management
• App deployment
• Workflow orchestration
• Orchestrate the app lifecycle
• Agentless architecture
• Uses OpenSSH and WinRM
• No agents to exploit or update
• Predictable, reliable and secure

Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower (formerly ‘AWX’: a community version of Ansible Tower) is a web-based solution that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It’s designed to be the hub for all of your automation tasks.

Tower allows you to control access to who can access what, even allowing sharing of SSH credentials without someone being able to transfer those credentials. Inventory can be graphically managed or synced with a wide variety of cloud sources. It logs all of your jobs, integrates well with LDAP, and has an amazing browsable REST API. Command line tools are available for easy integration with Jenkins as well. Provisioning callbacks provide great support for auto-scaling topologies.

Ansible vs. Ansible Tower

Most people reading this article are probably familiar with or have used Ansible, I will provide a brief explanation of what Ansible is and its place in the automation construct. Ansible is an IT automation solution. It is, more specifically, an open-source configuration, deployment, and orchestration tool that integrates with much of your technology stack: networking, security, application deployment, storage, software development lifecycle processes, etc.

Ansible is agentless, powerful, and simple, and therefore is easy to get up and running. A new sysadmin can get started with Ansible within hours.

Ansible Tower is the enterprise version of Ansible, and it helps organizations and teams scale quickly and effectively. There is a cost associated with adopting it, installing it, and getting the software up and running in your environments. Ansible Tower offers more control than the free version and is a great platform for breaking down silos, as it can be used cross-functionally in an efficient manner.

Why Ansible Tower?

Ansible Tower takes you beyond Ansible’s command-line interface to a web user interface, offering a more familiar environment for most customers, employers, and non-technical people. Tower allows sysadmins and DevOps/automation specialists to demonstrate the value and power of automation and provides easier training and demos that lead to quicker acceptance and overall buy-in so you can add this tool into your long-term automation strategy.

Ansible Tower is a scalable adoption strategy that, as your automation adoption grows, will be integral to quicker automation solutions. Those involved in the software life cycle process will thank you for choosing Ansible Tower. Here are a few of its features:

• A graphical user interface dashboard.
• Role-based access control.
• Job scheduling.
• Graphical inventory management.
• A multi-playbook workflow.
• RESTful APIs.
• External logging integrations.
• Real-time job status updates.
• Red Hat technical support.
• Red Hat Customer Portal access.

Ansible Tower is fully supported with updated release cycles, and the installation and upgrades are supported and well-documented. It also provides a 10-node free license with full enterprise features.

Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team. -NASA

NASA’s Implementation of Ansible Tower

BUSINESS CHALLENGE

NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.

SOLUTION

Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment

RESULTS

As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team. By the numbers:

• Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes
• Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
• Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes
• Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
• Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack