Ansible in IT infrastructure

Yashwanth Medisetti
3 min readDec 3, 2020

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Various challenges solved by ansible in industries

In today’s IT environment, enterprise applications can be complex, scalable, distributed, component-based, and often are mission-critical. They may be deployed on a variety of platforms across private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud. They may access sensitive data, they may be subject to regulatory guidelines and stringent security policies, and yet need to be as user friendly as possible too. In short, these applications are highly complex. In this post we’ll talk about how those considerations mesh with using automation tools like Ansible.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a simple way to automate apps and infrastructure. It includes Application Deployment, Configuration Management and Continuous Delivery. Ansible is an open source automation platform. What that means is that it lets you manage software installations, updates, configurations and tasks within your network environment. It’s especially handy in situations where you need to carry out sequential operations. If you are a windows user then you need to have a virtual machine in which Linux should be installed.

Ansible is most often used by companies with 50–200 employees and 10M-50M dollars in revenue.

There are 1447 companies reportedly use Ansible in their tech stacks, including HENNGE, ViaVarejo, and Tokopedia.LaunchDarkly. Typeform. trivago. It aims to provide large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges. This tool is very simple to use yet powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier IT application environments.

Problems faced :

As a result of the real world complexity of these applications, organizations have given these reasons as to why they haven’t looked to automate their enterprise applications. Perhaps they are also thinking about the fact that this is more than a technical challenge. Let’s be honest, automation is not only about the technology; it is a different way of thinking. It demands a cultural change.

Manual Deployments : Generally an update is done manually in the software which takes a lot of time and man power and any errors in the scripting or any minute error requires man power to rectify at any time. Hence automating the complete pipeline of events using some CI/CD tool (Jenkins) and many other helps to overcome this issue. Ansible is that kind of tool which helps in configuring the latest servers for different applications to run.

Growth of the use of ansible in various industries as an automation tool compared to other tools like Puppet , Chef , Salt and Terraform. ( The future of ansible is bright)

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