Ansible and the Industry

With the rapid digital transformation, the IT complexity is snowballing over time making tasks even more intricate. Every business is a digital business. So, with the growing business demands, the IT firms are struggling hard to develop, deploy, and maintain the sprawling systems. Technology is your innovation engine, and delivering your applications faster helps you win. Historically, that required a lot of manual effort and complicated coordination.

In the need of an hour, Ansible came to the aid of entire IT and DevOps team in terms of scaling automation, managing complex deployments and enhancing productivity.

Ansible is a revolutionary yet simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, etc. It is designed for multi-tier deployments, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy and most of all, it uses a very simple language (YAML, as Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

Now let’s see how companies use Ansible to get ahead of the competition…

Bar graph showing use of Ansible across different Industries

NASA (cloud migration) :

NASA wanted to move around sixty-five 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.

So, the solution for NASA’s problem was to use Ansible Tower to manage and schedule cloud environment. As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA became better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Ansible allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team.

1. Updating nasa.gov site went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes.
2. Patching updates which was initially a multi-day process was shortened to just 45 minutes.
3. Ansible allowed NASA to monitor RAM and disk in real-time.
4. Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process.

British Army speeds service delivery with Ansible

Due to problems with support, performance, and availability, the British Army’s IAS Branch needed to migrate from its Oracle private cloud environment. The system caused unplanned downtime during upgrades, disrupted users, and slowed update deployment. “There’s always pressure to deliver quickly,” said Lt. Col. Dorian Seabrook, head of operations at the British Army’s IAS Branch.

So as a solution IAS decided to migrate from Oracle Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, moving from physical infrastructure to a software-defined datacenter. To streamline management of its new environment, IAS used Ansible Tower by Red Hat, an automation and orchestration tool to improve consistency, reduce manual errors, and support a DevOps delivery approach.

Using Ansible…

• Accelerated deployment of critical patches from three days to three hours and cut changed delivery time by 75%.
• Gained access to expert support for troubleshooting any issues with new environment.
• Simplified and automated management to improve consistency and reduce manual errors.

“Red Hat and Ansible have met or exceeded all of the measurable outcomes we set for this project. Our adoption of these solutions is increasing throughout our organization.”

-Lt. Col. Dorian Seabrook

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Microsoft

Microsoft needed to address increasing complexity across their corporate network infrastructure — comprised of tens of thousands of endpoints — that connects Microsoft locations worldwide. “We have thousands of devices of various makes and models and software versions, so at times, it’s hard to keep up with all the different vendors and ways that we interact with those devices,” said Bart Dworak, Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Here again the solution was using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and working with Red Hat Consulting. Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity.

1. Established DevOps culture focused on learning new skills and collaborating across teams.

2. Saved thousands of work hours by mitigating network downtime and reducing production code defects.

3. Adopted centralized, phased automation to verify and reuse production code.

BMW

Worldwide, car manufacturers are focused on introducing automated vehicles, which require hundreds of millions of miles of driving data to prove their safety. To develop the driving algorithms for its automated vehicle initiatives, the BMW Group needed to access, analyze, and apply massive quantities of data and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed.

The BMW Group needed to access, analyze, and apply large amounts of data collected from sensors used during road tests to support its automated vehicle initiatives.

The BMW Group chose to work with DXC Technology to build a solution for its data and performance challenges. To create a Kubernetes-based platform with robust automation capabilities, DXC Technology deployed DXC Robotic Drive, a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) based on Red Hat OpenShift and other Red Hat technology. This solution helped the BMW Group develop faster with scalable machine learning and big data processing capabilities. The platform was configured and created in just 3 months. By automating repeatable tasks and providing self-service capabilities, the BMW Group significantly reduced development time and improved developer productivity. The platform also provides massively scalable data collection, processing, and storage capabilities. It offers close to 230 PB of usable storage and the compute power to simulate up to 240 million kilometers of test data.

Thankyou for reading. See you later!!! 😊👋