When Do I Use Ansible

When organizations require change and scalability, engineers are left making these changes manually. They need to make these changes quickly and without error. They need to develop Ansible playbooks. Manual errors are constantly introduced into the organizations and they cost time and money. While hiring more engineers to configure fewer systems is not cost-effective, it also does not provide a single viewpoint to manage your environment. Automated configuration management essentially mitigates all these risks with a singular solution, and, if you’re using the right configuration management software, it should be easy to tailor your solution to the unique context of your environment. Engineers can then start standardizing Ansible to manage the organization.

If you’re managing your configuration manually, you’re probably assigning one of your engineers to spend a fair amount dealing with it. The result is twofold: firstly, dedicating staff time to a task that can be carried out better by software is a waste of valuable staff hours. Secondly, assigning a staff member to your configuration management means that it becomes his area of interest and nobody else’s. Automated configuration management software allows access to anyone with the appropriate credentials, so if one of your staff members is overcapacity, it’s easy for a substitute to jump in with minimal impact to the operation of your network.

Manual configurations aren’t scalable. For this reason, it’s critical that any organization should remain as flexible as possible in its organizational and technological structures. Having to scale your network up or down without configuration management software could be an arduous and time-consuming task and depending on the size and complexity of your environment, Having to scale up quickly, having to make changes to resolve zero-day vulnerabilities, having to deploy the latest software for company enhancements is crucial to the health of the company. There is only one-way teams can quickly and accurately make the changes necessary, and automate.