Conquering Systems Management & App Deployment with Ansible by Red Hat

How Ansible Eliminates IT Complexity with Automation

Enabling Automation Capabilities with Ansible by Red Hat

It’s not often that you find a business or agency with an entirely local IT environment. The norm is disparate environments and hybrid IT strategies, used to take advantage of flexibility and enable the fast pace of delivery that the digital world demands. Yet, as IT environments increase in numbers and sprawl, they also increase in complexity, which makes development, deployment, and maintenance extremely difficult and time consuming.

This is why IT automation has become so critical in the technology realm. Explained by Network Computing, the constant production of new tools, technologies, and techniques is hard to keep pace with, but adopting new technology offers a multitude of business advantages. Finding the time to keep up, learn, test, and implement new capabilities within IT environments can be made possible by automation. Automation allows IT to work more efficiently and effectively, and with more time to add value through impactful projects, which is what Ansible by Red Hat aims to deliver. To sum it up, Ansible is an uncomplicated, agentless IT automation technology which is built to make current processes better, provide a single language for DevSecOps practices across your organization, and migrate applications for better optimization.

Making Life Easy for IT and Systems Administrators

“I was talking to a database admin last week, and she has to log into every single computer just to patch their database. So, what I told her is, she can write a single Ansible Playbook that will run that patching script on each node so she can run it centrally from one place and it’ll point that script to all databases. It’ll save her so much time not to log into 100 nodes just to patch something. She can just centralize it all within Ansible.”

-Manny Evangelista, Partner Solutions Architect at Red Hat

As mentioned above, IT is at a critical tipping point with regards to minimizing tedious, manual tasks in favor of focusing on IT projects that contribute to the business mission and a better bottom line. Life isn’t always easy for the typical IT manager or systems administrator. The age of the cloud and mass digitalization come with a multitude of environments that need to be managed, and more often than not, tech functions as a whole operate disparately—it’s not easy to keep up with, and frankly, doesn’t leave a lot of time for more interesting work.

Ansible is built to keep descriptions of IT simple and easy to build and understand. Here’s what Ansible makes possible for your IT team:

• New users can be brought into new IT projects quickly
• Expert users can take advantage of powerful capabilities, yet Ansible remains equally accessible for all skill levels.
• Time to market for IT projects is accelerated
• Turnaround on IT configuration changes is significantly less error-prone
• Clear orchestration of complex multi-tier workflows
• Cleanly unified OS configuration and application software deployment under one banner

Overall, Ansible is designed to be simplistic in nature, secure, and highly reliable, with a minimal learning curve for IT managers, systems administrators, and developers.

A Few Best Practices to Maximize the Benefits of Automation with Ansible

We asked Manny Evangelista, Partner Solutions Architect at Red Hat, about the best practices he recommends to maximize automation capabilities delivered by Ansible. Here’s what he said:

“The number one best practice is definitely leveraging Ansible Galaxy. It’s a repository of what we call ‘playbooks,’ and it’s actually what users build to do the automation. You can access the playbooks other people have built and don’t have to build things from scratch. So, if you needed to automate patching of a database, you can check Ansible Galaxy and see that someone has already done something similar that will get you 80% of the way there. Also, Ansible comes with an Ansible Galaxy Utility,that allows you to create your playbooks leveraging a best practice template so that your playbook is organized in a way where it’s reusable.

Another really important best practice is using Ansible Tower to manage your security and role-based access control for your enterprise environments.”

Support for Adopting Ansible by Red Hat

New to automation? Consult with the Red Hat specialists at August Schell to have a discussion about how you can use automation to empower your IT team to focus on more impactful activities while enhancing effectiveness and efficiency overall. We can help you identify the best way to use automation to enhance the operations of your agency and provide greater freedom to your IT team. Get in touch with August Schell today, or reach out to us by phone at (301)-838-9470.