Industrial Challenges Solved: Ansible

Ansible is the best available software for configuration management, provisioning and deployment. It provides agentless automation to configure a large scale system base at a simple click.

Starting with the most popular: Microsoft - The goal of end-to-end digitization simplifies processes and experiences for end users across all of its infrastructure teams managing services and applications. As part of this shift, the company is focused on building a culture of success, supported by automation technology. Using Red Hat Ansible Microsoft created a centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks and complexity. DevOps teams across the company can now focus on sharing knowledge, building skills, and creating innovative technology solutions.

Next we have, BMW: One the most popular luxury cars manufacturing company needs to access, analyze, and apply large amounts of data collected from sensors used during road tests to support its automated vehicle initiatives and update its driving applications with new algorithms as they are developed. The DXC Technology using Red Hat Ansible, the BMW Group’s new data platform helped the group reduce development time with faster, more accurate driving simulations and data analytics.

Finally, NASA needed to move roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware based data center to a cloud-based environment for better agility and cost savings. This created an environment spanning multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts that could not be easily managed. Even simple things, like ensuring every system administrator had access to every server, or simple patching, were extremely burdensome.

Implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. 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
• Achieving near real-time RAM and disk monitoring (accomplished without agents)
• Provisioning OS Accounts across entire environment in under 10 minutes
• Baselining standard AMIs went from 1 hour of manual configuration to becoming an invisible and seamless background process
• Application stack set up from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack

These were some case studies on the actual, real life challenges tackled by ansible.