The story of how Ansible automated Amelco

Amelco — Technology in Play

What is ansible and why developers love to use it? Why big companies are using ansible? How ansible works? In this article, I am gonna tell you about all these and a whole bunch of really exciting things. So let’s get started.

Some of you might say that developers love to use ansible because it can automate the boring tasks for them, which they might have to do everyday as a part of their daily work routine. But I don’t think Michael Dehaan developed ansible just for automation, because if you’ve ever researched, you might have noticed that we already had tools for automation even before the existence of ansible in the automated world of devops. Multiple languages like perl, bash, ruby and python can be used to do automated configuration just in one single click. So what makes ansible different from other automation tools?

The declarative nature of ansible makes it intelligent and different from other automated tools. But what does it exactly mean when I use the term “declarative”? So let’s imagine a scenario in which you came back home after working for long hours at the office and nobody’s at home, what would make you instantly happy after such a long tiring day? You might want a personal robot that can obey your order to prepare you a cappuccino coffee or seasoned sausage. Obviously, ansible can’t do this for you, but it can do something very similar to this which will help developers after a very long tiring day. In ansible, developers just need to declare the orders, they don’t need to type long commands because ansible is “cross-platform” which means that it can be used in any OS irrespective of the commands. What ansible will do behind the scenes? Ansible will gather all the facts about the target node including the OS type and then it will run the respective command. So, let say if a developer wants to install apache, he just have to declare the order to ansible to “install apache”, he don’t need to waste his precious time to run the command on different operating systems. Apart from its intelligent nature, ansible has lots of other advantages:

1) Agentless Architecture

Ansible is agentless meaning there are no daemons or agents needed to run a particular action. It automates configuration through pushing commands on SSH protocols. No additional installs are required at the end point.

2) Highly Secure and Reliable

Ansible is extremely reliable and secure making it a fair choice among developers, IT managers and administrators. The reason why Ansible makes connections secure is because it uses OpenSSH, especially for the remote ones.

3) Idempotency

Ansible playbook uses the concept of Idempotency, it means that actions remain the same without the requirement of any intervening actions. Just performing the action once would be sufficient.

4) Great Extensibility

Ansible offers great extensibility, irrespective of whether the modules are run locally or remotely to configure OS parameters, applications and servers.

So let’s talk about the story of a company which used the ansible framework to deploy, operate and upgrade their application while saving time, money and minimizing downtime —

AMELCO — TECHNOLOGY IN PLAY

Amelco is a UK-based company that develops software solutions for the betting industry and financial betting markets.

The Problem: Efficiency and lag was a problem when they had to deploy applications over 400 VMware nodes operating on Linux-based Ubuntu. Time was of essence and efficiency posed a problem. The company needed a solution that would minimize downtime.

The Solution: To do this, Amelco performed an Ansible migration to an agentless automation framework. This reduced the complexities it faced with the deployment, operations and the upgrade of applications over a range of contrasting locations, while also using one simplified language.

In addition, by introducing Ansible and Ansible Tower, Amelco has successfully automated its application deployments. Other benefits include reduced complexity and continuous delivery, along with speed solution delivery.

Further benefits include:

• “Faster time to deployment for its bespoke and modular client solutions, resulting in speedier time to market and higher customer satisfaction”.
• “A simplified and repeatable deployment process, leveraging true multi-tier, multi-step orchestration that minimized the complex dependencies of heterogeneous environments,”.

So this is how Ansible automated Amelco! Pick up the courage to get started with Ansible.