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Ansible - simple and powerful configuration management
January 29, 2020

Ansible - simple and powerful configuration management

Chris Saenz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ansible

Ansible is being used by our university IT engineering group that is responsible for managing and maintaining 700+ servers of different sizes and roles in hosting applications. We have a diverse datacenter environment with a variety of workloads and Ansible helps us to manage, primarily, our Linux servers, doing maintenance and orchestration tasks such as provisioning servers with particular configurations and run operational tasks on large subsets of servers.
  • Simple implementation by using readable yaml playbooks.
  • Natively has many modules that integrate with various software and technologies.
  • There are still some modules that should be native but are not (MSSQL, Vault, etc).
  • Creating extensive logic in the playbooks is not as straightforward as other scripting languages.
  • More efficient management of servers.
  • More quickly able to create playbooks to automate tasks.
Ansible is a lot simpler to learn and implement. It has a lot of native functionality and modules to connect to many different software and server types, so is very usable out of the box. Its use of native communication protocols (SSH) makes it so that no agent is needed, which, in my opinion, increases its reliability.
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.

Do you think Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform again?

Yes

VMware vCenter Server, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery
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.