In this article I am going to share my experience on the Ansible Industry Use Case Exclusive Session taken by two best industry expert Mr. SREEJITH ANUJAN and Mr. ARUN EAPEN.
Learned a lot about how Ansible is used in the industry for automation purposes. 💖
Firstly, let’s introduce the experts from RedHat who took the session -
➡ Mr. SREEJITH ANUJAN
He is Lead Technical Instructor, Red Hat.
▪️ Primarily responsible for empowering Red Hat customers with tailor-made enablement services.
▪ ️Also heading the designing and delivering high-quality content on integrated solutions and trusted partners across APAC, ANZ, and APJ.
▪️ Connected with RedHat for around 12+ years.
▪️ He was a Speaker in DevConf.in 2018 where he had discussed Linux Container Internals.
➡ Mr. ARUN EAPEN
He is Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific.
▪️ Specialist :- Linux and Security 🔐
▪️ The First RHC*(RHCA, RHCSS, RHCDS, RHCVA) in India.
▪️ Founding member of the Free Software Foundation India.
▪️ Being in open source software for more than 24 years.
In the RH294 Ansible Training that I am currently undergoing under Mr. Vimal Daga sir I have learnt many topics like ansible galaxy, roles, playbooks, vaults to name a few.
But I always wondered how in reality are the industries using Ansible for their automation tasks. 🤔
This exclusive session had all the answers for me.
My Learnings
Automation is the use of technology to accomplish a task at hand without having any manual human intervention.
Necessity of automation -
Due to the pandemic situation at present, many companies have undergone the process of digitization and adopting automation techniques to meet with the current demands and to give good service to their customers.
For achieving automation we should -
- Focus on smaller tasks rather than the complete complex task that needs to be done. By joining all those small tasks we can achieve the bigger tasks.
- Review what others might have done to automate a particular task and how we can modify it to achieve our goal.
- Treat automation like a software.
- Think out of the box !!
I have been using the ansible engine for quite sometime, and in this session I learned about Ansible Tower which is built on top of ansible engine.✨
Ansible Engine is a configuration management tool written in Python using a declarative approach to configure systems and networks. Using the ansible engine we write playbooks for configuration.
There is a controller node, where we write the playbooks and execute them there and ansible on our behalf does ssh to the target systems and does the configuration.
Now a problem comes that if the controller node fails then what will happen ? 🤔
If the controller node fails the complete automation setup fails.
Here Ansible Tower comes to our aid, it forms a clusters of towers so that even if one of the towers fails to operate the other towers are there to operate fully and they have a common shared database.
This feature of Ansible Tower makes it suitable for being used in the industry.
Some more things about Ansible Tower I learned in this session are as follows :
- It provides richer role-based access control, secure platform for sharing sensitive information.
- Template in Ansible Tower is for discovering playbook, credentials and the type of the same could be added securely in Ansible Tower.
- Verbosity of the playbook could be mentioned in the Ansible Tower. Workflow visualizer in Ansible Tower could be used to run playbooks one after another. It also helps us o achieve CI/CD development.
- Credentials could be setup for cloud service providers like IBM Cloud, Digital Ocean, AWS and many more in a very secure manner in a database in encrypted format.
- Ansible Tower provides more functionalities by its integration with Git resulting in GitOps and with Slack , resulting in ChatOps.
- Notification titles like Email, Grafana, IRC and many more could be set up in Ansible Tower.
I would conclude by saying that it was a very nice session where I got to know a lot of things how Ansible is used in the Industry and made me eager to know more and learn more.
Thank you Vimal Sir and Preeti Mam for arranging such a wonderful session for all the learners. 💖💖
Thank You ❗✌
