Ansible

What is Ansible?

Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform was developed to help organizations build and manage automation elements across their operational processes. It provides a comprehensive foundation for implementing enterprise-wide automation for workflows such as cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many others. 

Historically, manual effort has been required for much of these complex systems, but Ansible helps IT admins and managers eliminate traditional oversight and free up focus and available resources for more business-essential and growth-oriented tasks.   

How does Ansible work?

Designed for multi-tier deployments, Ansible starts by modeling an organization’s IT infrastructure and mapping out how the various systems and processes inter-relate. Ansible then connects these network nodes and implements small programs called “Ansible modules” across the infrastructure, which are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. These modules are then executed and removed after they finish processing.  

Ansible does not require any agents and does not use additional custom security infrastructure. An organization’s library of modules can reside on any device, eliminating the need for servers, daemons, or databases. 

Why is Ansible important? 

Ansible helps organizations operate faster, with more agility and at scale, while also not hampering innovation and quality results. The volatility of today’s markets and the disruption affecting almost every industry shows the importance of organizations being able to produce new products and applications without missing the mark on release dates, feature upgrades, or user experience. 

Benefits of Ansible

Ansible has a wide range of benefits for IT-based organizations, including: 

Higher velocity – Initiatives can be implemented faster by unifying Ansible’s open-source community and certified, prebuilt content, helping teams codify the infrastructure and share across the organization, whether operating on-premises or in the cloud. 

Empowered collaboration – Automation can be easily transferred across multiple departments and developer teams depending on their roles and access authorization without slowing development time. 

Streamlined growth – Ansible helps companies take automation further with analytics, policy and governance, and content management, generating greater efficiency and problem-solving. 

Common use cases for Ansible

Organizations are implementing Ansible for numerous initiatives such as: 

• • Complete IT automation – Ansible helps organizations seamlessly unite workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in a single and comprehensive, easy to deploy platform. 
  • Configuration management – Ansible allows for centralized configuration file management and deployment. 
  • Application deployment – Organizational teams can define and manage applications throughout the entire development and production lifecycle. 
  • Security automation – Ansible can take company security policies and integrate scanning and remediation of site-wide compliance with other automated processes, making it built-in rather than an add-on element. 

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