Ansible’s the answer

What is Red Hat Ansible?

How long does it take to do a deployment?  The answer to that question can often be depressingly, infuriatingly long, and can include classics like “well we haven’t done a merge for ages, so there’s that, and we have a few schema changes to make, so that’ll take a while” etc.  Sound familiar?

Enter Red Hat Ansible

Ansible is designed to take the heat, and more importantly the time, out of the deployment dilemma.  Simply put, it is the ability to automate pretty much all the tasks required to perform a successful deployment, whether that’s just copying files, performing builds, or provisioning application servers.  Not only that – but to do this remotely, to multiple potential destinations, on a variety of platforms, whether that be traditional operating systems, virtualized environments or container platforms.

One of Ansible’s strengths is that it’s agent-less, so there’s no need to deploy anything Ansible-related on your target deployment platforms – all the communication is done through SSH and WinRM.  A control machine runs Ansible scripts that you define, called “playbooks”, against a set of target hosts defined within an inventory file, which can include as few or as many hosts as you like. The real power within the playbook comes from the modules which encapsulate the functionality of myriad operating system and bespoke software commands into an Ansible-friendly format. Take a look at the Ansible module index here – it’s a very long list!

Although it’s been around for a while, the partner conference in Prague reminded us how impressed we are with Ansible.  So much so that we’re implementing it for deployments within our own agile development team – and red-tape permitting, at customer sites too.