Ansible helps to solving challenges in industries : Microsoft Azure
Today’s IT infrastructure is more complex than ever. So let’s see how industries are solving challenges using Ansible Tool
What is Ansible?
Ansible is a simple-to-use platform, easy to install and configure, with a very fast learning rate. In less than 30 minutes, it’s possible to install and configure the system and execute ad hoc commands for servers to solve a specific problem, daylight saving time adjustments, time synchronization, root password change, updating servers, restarting services, and so on.
🔷Ansible is an automation tool used for IT configuration management, deployment, and orchestration. There are so many popular tools are available such as Puppet and Chef, and debates rage about the relative merits of each.
🔷The popularity of Ansible has exploded since it was acquired by Red Hat in 2015 and the company invested in providing quality support for corporate teams.
🔷Ansible is designed to be minimal in nature, consistent, secure, and highly reliable, with an extremely low learning curve for administrators, developers, and IT managers.
🔷Ansible is designed to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Instructions in an Ansible play describe the end state of a component, rather than how to get to that end state. This approach is known as a “declarative model” of task specification (rather than an imperative model). Declarative tasks are more effective and reliable for managing complex systems because they are simpler and easier to understand. You don’t need to write out, or even know, all the steps to accomplish a task. You simply need to specify the end state.
🔷Using Ansible significantly reduces configuration time and day 0 deployments. Ansible’s agentless and easy-to-learn approach to configuration management makes it a favorite of IT admins.
Ansible Playbooks and YAML
Playbooks are the documents that describe Ansible automation tasks. They are written in the YAML(rhymes with “camel”) language. It is a simple data description language first released in 2001 and initially used for application configuration files in programming languages like Ruby on Rails. Today, YAML has been widely adopted as a language for specifying the configuration of almost anything from applications to virtual machines to networks. Examples of Playbooks for common tasks are widely shared and easy to find. For example, the Ansible documentation contains these examples of how to create, terminate, start, or stop an instance in AWS EC2.
Ansible Modules
The most interesting thing is module make intelligent to Ansible. It is the wide availability of modules to control almost any component of your IT infrastructure. Ansible benefits from having thousands of individuals at hundreds of companies contributing and maintaining modules. As a result, Ansible is becoming a defector standard for managing IT infrastructure.
Advantages of using Ansible
🔻Can perform task parallelly at a time on multiple server.
🔻No need to install any agent on client machine or we can say ansible is agent less.
🔻No need to open any external port. Ansible use ssh service port.
🔻We can use it for machine provisioning.
🔻Configuration management.
🔻We can manage our deployment.
🔻 No need of advance scripting for automation. There are lots of modules available.
Automate 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 make best sense. Ansible’s library of Azure modules makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete Azure infrastructure whenever you need, and in any region you require. For example, the same simple Playbook language you use for application deployment and on-premise automation also provisions your Azure infrastructure, applying the correct configuration.
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.
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 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.
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.
