Ansible

We had a set of validation scripts running on hosts before we adopt Ansible Automation Platform. Accessibility and security was a major concern. Also, the scheduling was cron-based and not flexible. Moving to Ansible help us resolve such issues/concerns.

The product is invaluable in the areas where post infra deployment configuration is required. It is not too suited for infra deployment as it is hard to maintain and remediate the state.

Ansible and AAP is well suited for orchestrating over many platforms. Its agentless architecture makes it ideal for infrastructure that cannot support an agent. It has a strong module library for the most common products, services, and platforms. It is by far the best language for anyone new to coding or automation to jump in and quickly get to a productive state. While AAP is capable of automating nearly anything, there are still advantages of using other platforms in its place. For example, Chef has been valuable for server automation because of the availability of existing cookbooks. For systems that can run an agent, having the individual nodes perform their own checks can scale a little better than the centralized model of AAP. But running an agent also means the potential risk of resource over utilization.

for confiration and server deployements it is very good to use

Based on its idempotent nature, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for the following scenarios:

1.) Configuration management: Ansible excels in managing and maintaining consistent configurations across a large number of systems. Whether it's configuring software, network devices, or infrastructure components, Ansible's idempotent operations ensure that desired states are achieved and maintained, even in complex environments.

2.) Continuous deployment and integration (CI/CD): Ansible is well suited for automating application deployment and orchestrating CI/CD pipelines. Its idempotent execution ensures consistent and reproducible deployments, making it easier to roll out updates, manage multiple environments, and integrate with popular CI/CD tools.

3.) Infrastructure provisioning and orchestration: Ansible is an excellent choice for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources. Its idempotent playbooks enable organizations to automate the creation and configuration of servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud resources, allowing for scalable and consistent infrastructure provisioning.

4.) System administration and operations: Ansible's idempotent nature makes it ideal for system administration tasks and operational automation. Whether it's managing user accounts, updating software packages, or performing routine maintenance tasks, Ansible ensures that operations are executed reliably and consistently across different systems and environments.

Ansible is the way...

AAP is well suited for customers that need to automate their configuration but don't necessarily have a lot of in house expertise and would benefit from the support of Red Hat.

Ansible Automation Platform has been solid when applying STIG/CIS guidelines and is great for managing configuration drift.

Ansible has been key to our success with server hardening as well as hardened image creations.

It is very good at working with any Linux system as well as many of the major products on the market. It's hard to work with Microsoft because of the many prerequisites needed on Windows servers. It can also be difficult to work with out of the box with systems that might require extra dependencies that need to be added to an Execution Environment to interact with.

For us we use it to deploy windows, linux server provisioning.

Configuration management, any repeatable workflows.

Server build process from deployment to hardening Secure cloud resources Keep security requirements up to date on end points

It is well suited in enviroments where there is a lot interaction with API. Its not well suited for working with multiple users or playbooks where there are lot of variables included. It can see the benefits where there are dislocated environments with low bandwidth. Use of hop nodes are really beneficial in combination of isolated nodes.

Ansible is a given in nearly any environment. It can automate almost any infrastructure device you can think of.

It might not be worth the work for Windows only or environments with less than 50 hosts.

That is a big task for all the functionality now in Ansible Collections - Ethernet Networking, Fibre Channel Networking, Wireless networking, LB/ADC configuration & changes. Storage config and changes, VMware provisioning and changes, Windows Desktop provision when paired w/ a tool like Zuul, Workflow integration w/ ServiceNow (SNOW), Testing framework such as Molecule really all you to ensure what you have in your playbooks is solid...prior to deployment not when released to your consumers; Critical. Consistent runbooks instead of managing tons of scripts allows for cross-team training and functionality in a true disaster scenario. Additionally, conversion tools from other IT automation offerings Puppet and Chef, integration into Cloud environments. The list grows daily so jump in the water is just right!

Ansible works well when managing a large number of devices and servers. It helps to standardize builds and automate provisioning of servers and software so that builds are done quickly and repeatably. It works well for SSH-based hosts and standard unix-like systems. It also works well for system administrators who may not have a strong background in scripting and automation. It is a simple and readable language and a playbook is easy to pass along a team and collaborate on.

Users can get up to speed and productive quickly with the tool. Ansible Galaxy portal serves as the central repository for finding, reusing, and sharing Ansible content. Agentless and troubleshooting are easier.

If your company is using cloud services like either Amazon Web Service or Google Cloud Platform, you will have time to implements lots of servers and managing them can be a pain. Ansible can be the help that enables you to manage all the config files you have for your servers and executes them in seconds.

Great for automating groups of servers and ensuring updates are pushed to all of them (simultaneously if needed). It's hard to manage large groups of servers, and this tool makes it almost too simple. If there is only one server that is unique from the others, Ansible will not be as useful, but can still help track your changes.

I would recommend Ansible to anyone, but I recognize it might not fit everyone's needs. I'm not as familiar with Chef, Puppet, or Salt, but they each have their strengths. For us, we needed to be able to manage a new server the moment it was created, so agent-based solutions were out. For our use, Ansible does everything we've asked it to.

Ansible is perfect for provisioning virtual machines or containers. It's also useful for standardized setup of different software projects. For example, the main supported setup configuration of Red Hat Open Shift is made in Ansible.

Ansible is really unique in that it works well for various DevOps needs. I find it very well suited for:

1. Automation Scripts - think: deployment scripts, configuration scripts, start-up/shut-down scripts, cron jobs, etc.
   
2. Infrastructure as Code - although I would not say it is Ansible's primary use case, Ansible still has a good amount (albeit not comprehensive) of cloud infrastructure orchestration modules, things like creating EC2 instances, ELBs, S3 buckets, Azure resources, etc.
   
3. Decentralized / "Push" Configuration Management - that means you trigger Ansible from a client machine and it will remotely execute the configuration scripts over SSH. This is actually enough for many configuration management use cases.
   

It may not work extremely well for the following cases:

1. Complex Infrastructure as Code needs - i.e. cloud infrastructure that consists of many cloud resources of different types and advanced configuration.
   
2. Configuring Complex Clusters or Ecosystems - for this I would prefer "Pull" / Centralized Configuration Management solution that offers inventory look-ups and integrated data store solution as part of the configuration process.

[it's] simple, straight forward, easy to set up and get started with. It's very well suited for automatic server provisioning. It might not perform as well as more mature solutions (Chef, Puppet, etc.) for very large environments with thousands of servers. But it will outperform in a dynamic phase environment where speed is critical.

Well suited: Automatic server provisioning for multiple deployment environments (development, staging, quality assurance, production, etc). It's also useful for kick-starting a new engineer's development environment so they can be productive on day 1.

Less appropriate: Rebuilding projects for integration testing. Tests are things that (should) run frequently on every build. As Ansible downloads a lot of resources over the wire (and often without a local cache), this can drastically increase the time required for an incremental build and test.