Ansible and Ansible Tower- industry oriented approach
We all know that AI and automation are the need for our future, but how will we make this future a reality!? and how are scaling industries integrating automation with their workflow by using automation tools such as 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.
How is ansible used in industries ??
Ansible is used for multi-tier deployments, It doesn't require any middleman or security for any deployments. It uses a very simple language to communicate that is YAML which is used for automation jobs.
Ansible connects nodes and creates small programs, called Ansible modules to them. These programs are written to achieve the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules.It works by connecting nodes through SSH or Kerberos.
What is ansible tower ??
Ansible Tower provides an extremely user-friendly web-based Redhat platform for large scale organizations. It can state summaries of all the hosts, allows quick deployments, and monitors all configurations. It makes dealing with SSH credentials easy and secure. It can perform role-based tasks, integrate with third party softwares and schedule tasks.
Ansible towers can be very useful to graphically manage inventories and sync them with cloud providers.
Anisble Tower can be termed as the cluster of Ansible control nodes. It is a command-line tool for enterprise-level automation built on top of the ansible engine.
Features of Ansible tower
Ansible dashboard
The Ansible Tower dashboard provides a platform to view everything going on in your Ansible environment like host and inventory status, all the recent job activity and a snapshot of recent job runs.
Real-ime job status update
As Ansible automates the infrastructure, plays and tasks can be viewed as they are completed , and each success or failure, complete with output is displayed. Status of present automation and future automation projects in the queue can also be managed in real time.
Multi-playbook workflow
Ansible Tower Workflow helps to easily model complex processes with Ansible Tower’s workflow editor. Ansible Tower workflows chain multiple playbooks, and other workflows, even if they use different inventories or run as different users or utilize different credentials.
Activity Stream
Automation is secured within ansible towers, all the customizations are recorded, all detrails regarding the projects are securely stored and viewable later, or exported through Ansible Tower’s API.
Activity streams shows a complete audit trail of all changes made to Ansible Tower itself — job creation, inventory changes, credential storage, all are securely tracked.
Scale capacity with tower clusters
Connect multiple Ansible Tower nodes into a Ansible Tower cluster. Ansible Tower clusters add redundancy and capacity, allowing to scale Ansible automation across entire enterprise, including with reserved capacity for certain teams and jobs, and remote execution for across network zones. Current Ansible Automation architecture can scale to 200K nodes with 20 cluster nodes. Scaling is most important because if control node is goes down then we scale horizontally to avoid single point of failure.
Schedule jobs
Jobs can be scheduled like nightly backups, periodic configuration remediation for compliance, or a full continuous delivery pipeline.
Ansible towers are also integrated with SLACK for ChatOps functionality where notifications can be integrated directly from the ansible tower.
Special thanks to Mr.Sreejith Anujan (principal instructor at RedHat) and Mr. Arun Eapen(Director-APAC Service Delivery, GLS at Red Hat Asia Pacific) for the amazing session on Automation Using Ansible — Demo (Practical Implementation)
