Ansible -The Next Generation Automation Framework

Whether we accept it or not, humans are LAZY! We all can agree that today, whatever the enhancements we humans have made in all the fields are because we want to do everything effortlessly and speedily.

We invented cars and motorbikes to avoid the efforts of walking and reduce the time required to travel around.

We replaced manual labour in industries by fast and efficient machineries.

We invented computers to perform complex calculations and much more within fraction of time required by humans, that too without any mistakes!

Coming to the point, you can agree with me that we humans always try to minimize our efforts by creating and inventing new tools. Now, why am making you realize this? Let us see…

Around a decade back, the industry of cloud computing started increasing rapidly. All the big and small companies were using cloud computing and servers in one way or the other. However, things were not going as smoothly as they should.

All the big companies and organizations from all industries were facing great challenges in deploying, configuring and managing and executing and sort of operations because of the complexity in their datacenters.

They all wanted Automation in their datacenters. But they also wanted simplicity, as at that time, they used to write special scripts for automating every task, which was a tedious task and the execution was very complex.

There was no automation tool that simple, agentless and powerful. And the industry needed it badly…

As I said earlier, we humans always want to do everything effortlessly and speedily. So this gave rise to Ansible, The Next Generation Automation Framework on February 20, 2012.

Watch the below images to understand what Ansible exactly is.

Ansible is a Configuration Management, Orchestration and Application Deployment at one place, which is kinda like nothing!

Today, Ansible is used by many top level companies and organizations. (NASA, Microsoft, AWS, Siemens, BMW, Cisco, etc. to name a few)

Ansible is increasingly being adopted by all the big and small companies and organizations due to its simplicity, agentless nature and powerfulness.

Let us look at how Ansible has helped NASA:

Firstly, let us understand what is NASA WESTprime:

The WESTprime’s initial focus was to move roughly 65 applications off the old datacenter as quickly as possible in a seemingly impossible timeline.

Before implementing Ansible, even simple things like ensuring every SysAdmin had access to every server, or simple patching were extremely burdensome!

The NASA WESTprime was using a lot of shell shell scripts. There was a lot of “manually ssh-in-and-do-x” type of work being done.

But why did NASA choose Ansible?

So after implementing Ansible, now, the NASA web app servers are being patched routinely and automatically through Tower with a very simple 10-line Ansible code!

Every single week, www.nasa.gov is updated via Ansible , including the mobile version in just 5 minutes!

NASA is also able to monitor RAM and CPU usage with Ansible in near real-time, that too, without any agent!

There is a level of comfort and confidence that Ansible has been able to provide that simply was not there before -NASA

If you want to gain more information about the case study of NASA, click here.

That is it for this blog. Thanks for reading!