A Session with the Ansible Veterans

I recently had the opportunity of joining a session which was led by Mr. Sreejith Anujan who is a principal instructor in Redhat. He is primarily responsible for empowering Red Hat customers with tailor-made enablement services. Along with him we had Mr. Arun Eapen who is Director of APAC in Redhat Asia Pacific region.

The session was about ansible . To be more specific it was about ansible tower and how industries actually use ansible in their work where they described various use cases and putting cherry to the pie was the demonstration because usually we don’t get exposure from industry specialists in terms of demonstration.

In this blog I would like to share what I learnt and how the experience was with session.

The session covered various use cases on the ansible tower is used in industries.

Firstly ansible tower is the enterprise level of ansible we use with variety of features to ease the work of industries.

It is a secure platform so sharing playbooks or credential data is very secure.

Firstly there was an introduction on why we need automation so much now. The answer to this is pretty simple. The pandemic has made many companies realise that without automation the sustenance in current world is very hard.

Some key features of ansible tower includes:

• we can easily share credentials since it is very secure
• we can create workflows to automate the different projects and bind them together.
• There is a webUI available to access the ansible tower.
• we can easily connect to various platforms by adding notifications like slack.
• various API are availiable to be used on ansible tower.
• ansible tower provides clustering of controller nodes so if a controller node is taken down we can easily use another node from the cluster and much more.
• Ansible tower has it’s own database where we can store our credentials such as key and password. So that in future we can use those credentials to integrated with clouds.

In actual enterprises we just don’t have a single playbook which we run. We have a whole workflow. Where a task being performed depends upon the previous tasks. And there are contingency plans which are executed when a certain action doesn’t perform the way it should.

All these can be managed by creating workflows which can also be visualized using the web user interface of the ansible tower.

Ansible tower uses the ansible engine and has one centralized DB. It can be used to automate a CI/CD pipeline, provisioning infrastructure. Helps developer to test environment by easily creating complete infrastructure in just seconds.

In ansible engine we cannot use scaling feature but we can tower in that case, it will provide security to our credentials we don’t need to create separate files or vault to store the credentials and we can make workflow and approval process in that workflow to process multiple playbooks with one click.

The session was very informative, practical and engaging. I would like to that Vimal sir and Preeti ma’am for giving the the opportunity to engage directly with industry professionals