Ansible Now!
November 28, 2018

Ansible Now!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ansible

Ansible helps us with configuration management, application deployment, task automation. It also does IT orchestration, where we have to run tasks in sequence and create a chain of events which must happen on several different servers or devices. In short, we use Ansible to handle complex tasks with a tool which is easy to use.
  • Unlike Puppet or Chef, Ansible doesn’t use an agent on the remote host. Instead it uses SSH which is to be installed on all the systems we want to manage.
  • Ansible is written in Python, which we install on all remote host. This means that we don’t have to setup a client server environment before using Ansible.
  • Ansible can work alongside our other DevOp tool, Chef. This allows us to reach out to existing Chef teams in order to try and organize their work all under the same DevOps umbrella.
  • Unlike Chef, Ansible employes a Push methodology rather than Pull. We found that this doesn't scale well for us, thus we had to consider using Ansible Tower in order to scale.
  • Ansible's free training and tutorials do no provide as much depth and ease for first time users trying it out for the first time.
  • From the limited experience we have had with Ansible Tower, the UI is not very user friendly. There's a lot of bells and whistles that can prove o be overwhelming at times.
  • Ansible has definitely helped our security team keep our servers up to date on the latest vulnerabilities through their continuous team of patch deployments.
  • The time to market for our code deployments have sped up 3 fold at least and is expected to continue improving as more teams are comfortable with DevOps framework.
  • Ansible is open source and free, which is great. But for an enterprise deployment, we had to budget for extra nodes as Tower only comes with licenses for 10.
Ansible is a great product, which we really love as it is compatible running along side and with other DevOps tool. The integration features allows other teams to participate in our shared objective. Ansible is easy to use as many programmers are familiar with Python and RHEL. We selected Ansible because its easy barrier to entry and pricing model for new users with not many nodes to manage. We will continue to develop and on-board teams and monitor the scaling abilities of Ansible.
Ansible did a great job helping us patch simple security vulnerabilities on many servers. The code for the fix were no more than about 100 lines. We patched each vulnerability in about 10 minutes. We patched both the HeartBleed/OpenSSH along with the Shellshock Bash vulnerability on 200+ servers in a few days.