Automation using Ansible

Hello everyone, this blog is about my experience on “Automation using Ansible” demo practical workshop on Industry use case which was organized by LinuxWorld on 28th of December.

First, let’s know about our Industry experts who delivered such fenomenal content.

⚜ Mr. Sreejith Anujan ⚜

The Principal Instructor at Red Hat

▪️Primarily responsible for empowering Red Hat customers with tailor-made enablement services.

▪️Also heading the designing and delivering high-quality content on integrated solutions and trusted partners across APAC, ANZ, and APJ.

▪️Connected with RedHat for around 12+ years.

▪️He was a Speaker in DevConf.in 2018 where he had discussed Linux Container Internals.

⚜ Mr. Arun Eapen ⚜

(Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific)

▪️ Specialist :- Linux and Security 🔐

▪️The First RHC*(RHCA, RHCSS, RHCDS, RHCVA) in India.

▪️Founding member of the Free Software Foundation India.

▪️Being in open source software for more than 24 years.

The session was about telling the industry use case of Ansible and Ansible Tower with practical demonstration. Here are some of the learnings :

What is Automation?

Automation is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver goods and services with minimal human intervention. In IT industry automation is used to perform repeated processes so as to minimize manual work as manual work increases cost, time consumption and chances of mistakes.

Automation solutions are based on your unique needs and goals and pay for themselves quickly due to lower operating costs, reduced lead times, increased output and more.

Ansible Tower

Ansible Tower (formerly ‘AWX’) is a web-based solution that makes Ansible even more easy to use for IT teams of all kinds. It is designed to be the hub for all of our automation tasks.

Tower allows us to control access to who can access what, even allowing sharing of SSH credentials without someone being able to transfer those credentials. Inventory can be graphically managed or synced with a wide variety of cloud sources. It logs all of our jobs, integrates well with LDAP, and has an amazing browsable REST API. Command line tools are available for easy integration with Jenkins as well. Provisioning callbacks provide great support for auto-scaling topologies.

It also provides the facility to notify, for example, when a job fails, a notification is sent using the configuration defined by the notification template. It supports various notification types such as Email, Grafana Hipchat, Slack, Twilio etc. It allows better coordination between teams as everyone gets to know what other person has done and when.

Scaling

Scaling vertically (up/down) means adding resources to (or removing resources from) as and when required so that to increase profit and reduce cost.

Job Template

Job Template is just like a playbook which ansible tower uses for automation but it provides additional features as compared to playbook. It also encourages the reuse of Ansible playbook content and collaboration between teams.

Custom Credential type

Ansible tower allows to create our own custom credential type which works in similar way as existing credential types. For example, we could create a custom credential type that injects an API token for a third-party web service into an environment variable, which our playbook or custom inventory script could consume.

This is just a small glimpse of what all we learnt in the session.

Thank you!!