What is Ansible and How Big Companies are using it?

4 min readDec 1, 2020

So, What IS this Ansible?

Ansible is a universal language. Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It turns tough tasks into repeatable playbooks.

Using Ansible, we’ve been able to cut down certain processes from 17 hours to 3 minutes.
BRANDEN FAULLS
Head of Platform
FATMAP

Problems :

-Manual Deployments

-Complex Deployments

-Inconsistent Environments(a.k.a. The Human Factor)

-Waterfall Culture

Use-Case:

Complete IT automation

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

Ansible is the only automation language that can be used across entire IT teams from systems and network administrators to developers and managers.

Ansible Tower:

With Red Hat® Ansible® Tower you can centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical inventory management.

Some Important Features:

*Currently, 8,781+ companies are using Ansible with one or another use case.

NASA(USA):

“Ansible Tower has allowed us to provide better operations and security to our clients. It has also increased our efficiency as a team.” — NASA

By the numbers:

• Updating nasa.gov went from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes.

Patching updates went from a multi-day process to 45 minutes.
Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes.
Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.

Fore More: https://www.ansible.com/hubfs/pdf/Ansible-Case-Study-NASA.pdf?hsLang=en-us

MICROSOFT(USA):

Adopted centralized, phased automation to verify and reuse production code
Established DevOps culture focused on learning new skills and collaborating across teams
Saved thousands of work hours by mitigating network downtime and reducing production code defects

Microsoft’s teams established 3 automation environments:

Development, where code is developed and tested on a small scale
User acceptance testing (UAT), where code is peer-reviewed and tested at scale
Production

Engineers now automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks by deploying Ansible Playbooks to the network through a centralized playbook version control system.

MICROSOFT OPERATIONS TEAMS SAVE THOUSANDS OF HOURS OF WORK WITH ANSIBLE WORK.

“We actually have a process out right now that closes about 97–98% of the tickets that come in via automation.”- MICROSOFT

For more Refer: https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/microsoft-case-study

BMW(Germany):

To develop the driving algorithms for its automated vehicle initiatives, the BMW Group needed to access, analyze, and apply massive quantities of data — and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed.

The solution helps the BMW Group develop faster with scalable machine learning and big data processing capabilities. The platform was configured and created in just 3 months.