Ansible

We’ve begun leveraging AAP for various workflows that would normally take multiple hours away from our dev's workload, streamlined it to a matter of minutes, and reduced human error significantly. One example would be leveraging the provisioning of application environments directly leveraging Terraform and Ansible. We kick off our terraform files within Ansible, gather the pertinent information for the new environment, and then follow up with additional tasks to configure the environment to expedite the delivery of the environment to the product owner. What would normally take a couple of days between provisioning the servers, patching/adjusting security, and deploying required software done by other teams has been consolidated into a workflow that will complete all the steps of multiple teams in a single workflow. Another use case we have leveraged is the start-to-finish deployment of custom virtual machine images. All with Ansible, we clone a baseline template, update configurations, customize to customer specifications (hostnames, IP addresses, etc.), deploy our proprietary software stack, confirm everything is functioning as intended, shut down the host, and then export the image and upload directly to object storage. From there, it will generate a user/password combination to allow the customer to download the image and notify the project manager to distribute the information to the customer to download the image. Once deployed, a provision callback occurs to finalize the remainder of the deployment, which needs to be done on-site. The entire process would typically take days of coordination between us and the customer, but it has now been reduced to less than a day, depending on how long it takes to deploy.

I use AAP for the creation of Windows gold images, Windows and RHEL server builds, and interfacing with vendor APIs.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for almost every aspect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS system administration. This product addresses compliance drift, package and repository management, and custom application deployment. The platform manages almost every OS configuration file, ensuring consistency across all systems in a timely and efficient manner.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate nearly all aspects of our Linux administration workflows. We use it to run our "post provisioning" playbooks that setups new servers/VMs and configures them to our authentication source, package repositories (satellite) sets up security policies etc. We also are beginning to use it to automatically patch some servers on a pre-defined schedule. We also schedule other tasks such as updating certain accounts with their latest password(s). We also use it to deploy some applications and scripts through automated processes utilizing our CICD pipelines inside of GitLab.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate infrastructure configuration. While our target uses are still growing and being identified, this helps us reduce human error when deploying infrastructure to our internal customers.

The platform addresses several business problems, such as:

1.) Manual and repetitive tasks: Ansible Automation Platform helps eliminate manual, repetitive tasks by automating them. This reduces human error, increases efficiency, and allows IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.

2.) Configuration management: Managing configurations across a large number of systems can be challenging. Ansible Automation Platform enables centralized management of configurations, ensuring consistency and compliance across the infrastructure.

3.) Application deployment and orchestration: Deploying and managing applications across different environments can be time-consuming and error-prone. Ansible Automation Platform simplifies application deployment and provides orchestration capabilities to streamline the process.

4.) Infrastructure provisioning: Provisioning and managing infrastructure resources can be complex, especially in cloud or hybrid environments. Ansible Automation Platform helps automate infrastructure provisioning, enabling organizations to scale resources efficiently and consistently.

Ansible is a powerful tool for many DevOps cases, including generic automation scripts, configuration management, and infrastructure orchestration. We've used it mainly for complex application deployments - for each application, we wrote an Ansible playbook to deploy the application and all dependencies to target Chef-managed environments. The deployment process for each application varied a lot and was often very complex, and each playbook would have different logic for configuration and validations.

Those applications ranged from J2EE applications to cron jobs. Target VMs would range from Tomcat application servers to plain Linux machines.

I have also used Ansible for other uses such as for simplifying interaction with a large cluster of nodes to perform system administration tasks (e.g. fetching logs, investigating issues across nodes of a cluster..etc). I have also used its Python library to create custom automation scripts. It worked very well for all cases above.

We use Ansible to automate provisioning of both Amazon AMIs and other EC2 resources. It orchestrates the installation of all of the software we need to power our platform in production and leaves us with a reliable, predictable machine state on every run.

We've also used Ansible to vary the state of dependencies installed on a machine after it's been deployed to production.