Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud computing services used to build apps or take advantage of cloud infrastructural services, achieve legacy infrastructure modernization, or manage enterprise data and analytic needs.
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Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
When most of our stuff is in Google Cloud Platform, it works great to integrate and cross/share data that is all in Google Cloud Platform or BigQuery. It has simplified things from a permissions perspective as well. I'd say it is less appropriate when trying to test something quickly locally, or when half your stuff is in AWS or another provider.
Red Hat Ansible automates server management, configuration updates, and deployments across our server infrastructure, keeping everything consistent, reducing human error, and saving time. Also provides detailed reports on what is done and uses role-based access controls to keep systems secure by controlling who can make changes.
It reduces custom scripting efforts because everything can be scripted in simple, human-readable YAML playbooks.
Not only servers, but also network devices, VMs, Containers, Kubernetes clusters, etc., can be automated via Ansible, showcasing its extensive list of supported devices.
It is agentless, which makes it lightweight and allows for easy integration into CI/CD and GitOps pipelines.
Many Tier-1 telcos use Ansible for Day 0/1/2 automation of RAN, transport, and core infrastructure (e.g., network function lifecycle management, NE configuration push, patching VNFs).
The UI is so confusing. The console is good, but it is like a maze. There are too many menus and settings, and things do not work as expected. It takes time to get friendly, and it is not friendly for new users.
Support experience: Sometimes, you get a great engineer, but other times, it's very difficult to talk with them as they are unable to respond as expected and solve issues late.
Region and zone are issues, as not all services are available in all regions, which is lacking when deploying something in the same region or zone.
I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
The Google Cloud Platform console is pretty slick for BigQuery especially. I have liked the visibility I get from using that and the way to integrate and see what's in our data lake. The logging console for tracking GKE jobs isn't quite as great, which is why it doesn't get a full 10.
Overall, the product is excellent, with daily-use features for both large and small infrastructure. Ansible does its job quickly and ensures compliance, keeping the environment up to date and safe from open vulnerabilities. Large-scale inventory management and license management. Industry standard followed by best practices to maintain continuity. Budget-friendly compared to other products.
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
Google Cloud Platform is release later than Amazon web service, I think that why Google Cloud Platform can learned and optimized the Dashboard and some features that make it easy to use and can be cheaper than amazon web service.
AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
It allows us to focus our efforts on other, more important items at hand
It gives us an affordable option letting me know it's available to all users, not just the largest scale ones out there
The customer service is always helpful and reliable, along with the service itself which lets me focus on my work instead of worrying about the service.
POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)