Why and How I Use Ansible

Automation is the only way that you can quickly, consistently, and cost-effectively deliver changes that your organization needs. It allows you to deliver the changes faster and you can guarantee the outcome of every change. With automation, you can save on the cost of adding additional resources and time delays required in training new personnel. You are now able to empower your whole team to make changes and manage the environment. You remove the isolated project experience that usually comes from one person managing a project.

Ansible will allow you to work together on projects. You can now work together to develop standards and best practices. Best of all, you now have a way to implement them and ensure that they are followed and adhered to. By creating a process of change control you can manage and guarantee all updates to your systems. These processes do not have to be overly complex, but by establishing them you can control changes and help maintain compliance. When audit time comes, don’t worry about whether you have incorrectly configured, rouge systems.

When changes are required to be made, they can sometimes impact the whole organization. You need to make these as quickly as possible and as accurately too. When you have a team of people you can begin to attack the problem manually and work your way through the list. While this is how we used to solve this problem, we have a much better way. Ansible allows you to select any range of servers and deploy the updated configuration. You can have any member of your team make the change and know that the work was done correctly and fast.

When people talk about learning how to automate, there is usually a sense of fear or uncertainty about how long will it take for me to learn. I don’t know how to code. Am I going to need to learn? The great answer about why so many people love Ansible is no. You don’t have to learn to code and the learning curve for Ansible is the easiest automation tool out there. When you look at the playbooks for Ansible, the components that run all your tasks, you can quickly see what is going on no matter your level of expertise with it. When we look at the example below we can see that the system is going to make sure that our web service is on the latest version that is available and is running. Now, anytime you need to make a change to your web service or any other component of your infrastructure you can quickly deploy and know that it’s done.

Now you can have that peace of mind in knowing your systems in the state you want and you can take that time to tackle the next opportunity.