ANSIBLE Use-Case: How NASA Using Ansible For Solving The Challenges ?
→💫 Technology leads to Automation, makes your work easier , save time, give happiness and integrated with any other core-technology ,working in any domain: ANSIBLE 💫←
Greetings Connections!😃
💥Here is my new article based on Case-Study of NASA for solving the challenges by them through Ansible🎊.🤩
⭐ Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today. With over 2,900+ contributors submitting new modules all the time(according to my research). Ansible is a simple way to automate apps and infrastructure. It includes Application Deployment, Configuration Management and Continuous Delivery.
⚡ “Ansible is a simple, powerful and agentless automation platform which has the capabilities to solve the most challenging problems.”🎉
🔰Ansible’s Features and Capabilities
🔰How Ansible Works ?
🔰NASA Case-Study with Ansible Tower 💫
In this case study, we show how NASA uses Ansible Tower to better manage their environment, provide better security as well as to increase efficiency.⚡
⏩CUSTOMER: NASA INDUSTRY
➡️Government: INTEGRATION Cloud/AWS
⏩USE CASES: Configuration Management
➡️BUSINESS ISSUE: Increase efficiency, cloud migration
⏩BUSINESS CHALLENGE: 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. The rapid timeline resulted in many applications being migrated ‘as-is’ to a cloud environment. 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.⚡
➡️Have You Met Tower ?
🔥 AUTOMATION = Time and Less Complexity 🔥
⏩ About NASA
NASA’s web infrastructure — WestPrime==Web Enterprise Service Technologies prime. Blanket purchase agreement funded by NASA. Contracted to InfoZen Inc., a cloud broker and integrator based in Rockville , MD. InfoZen responsible for entire cloud migration for all NASA web assets. Tech in play — LifeRay, MongoDB, Acronis, AWS … 50% Ubuntu, 35% Redhat, 5% Amazon Linux, 10% Windows.⚡
➡️ Challenge:
Migrating 110 websites & apps to Amazon in 22 weeks. Updating the old. Servers not updated = Vulnerable. No working, just talking. Everything was manual, following tasks documents. With time — started using shell scripts. Simple things were extremely burdensome. WEST Prime’s initial focus was to move roughly 65 applications off the old data center as quickly as possible in a seemingly impossible timeline. All of a sudden, they had an environment spanning multiple VPCs and AWS accounts with no way of centrally managing it. They were faced with a very ugly scenerio where even simple things like ensuring every SysAdmin had access to every server or simple patching were extremely burdensome.⚡
⏩ Before Ansible(or Tower) :
Ansible Core: Simple, Agentless & Powerful. Previously, NASA WEST Prime was using a lot of shell scripts. There was a lot of “manually ssh-in-and-do-x” type of work being done. Then, they created a demo day in which they invited the automation players to demonstrate the enterprise flavors of their product. After quite a long day of deep level demos and Q&A , and a week, of analysis with the technical team they decided unanomously that Ansible was the best fit for them.⚡
➡️ WHY❓
No agents. Very small learning curve( a day or less!). Non-technical staff can read a play and know what’s happening. Native use of SSH. The most active open source community among its competitors.⚡
⏩ With Ansible(or Tower):
Access Control — Organizations, Teams, Users. Built-in Logging. Non-technical Friendly. NASA web app servers are being patched routinely and automatically through Tower with a very simple 10-line Ansible playbook. Because of Ansible , they are able to organize the inventory of AWS resources in a very granular way that was not at all possible before. One time, they faced some strict deadlines for monitoring and they didn’t have time to deploy Nagios agents (due to lengthy approval workflows in place) to monitor RAM and CPU. So what did they do? They did a very simple hack to be able to monitor CPU and Ram with Ansible in near real-time (no agent required!).⚡
✔️Ansible was leveraged to remediate both OpenSSL issues this year in ridiculous time (leadership was blown away). It is also used to ensure our environment is compliant with necessary Federal security standards as outlined by FedRAMP and other regulatory requirements. There is a level of comfort and confidence that Ansible has been able to provide that simply was not there before. ⚡
➡️ Have You Met Tower ?
⭕ Solution :
⚡‘Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment.’☑️
💠 Results :
As a result of implementing Ansible Tower, NASA is better equipped to manage its AWS environment. Tower allowed NASA to provide better operations and security to its clients. It has also increased efficiency as a team. 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⚡
🔰Other Companies and Organizations which are using Ansible…‼️
⏭️ Companies such as AWS, Twitter, Vodafone, Microsoft, etc. are also using ansible for managing their data and for fastest speed working to make easier work-flow among all the branches or datacenters. It also provides security with high configuration management and also easy to write the code in playbook(YAML language).⚡
INTEGRATION: Ansible 💻 and AWS☁️
⭕ Manage Cloud Like Cloud with Ansible
👉 When you deploy an application into AWS, you will soon realize that the cloud is much more than a collection of servers in someone else’s data center. You now have a fleet of services available to you to rapidly deploy and scale applications. However, if you continue to manage AWS like just a group of servers, you won’t see the full benefit of your migration to the cloud. Ansible automation can help you manage your AWS environment like a fleet of services instead of a collection of servers.⚡
👉 Ultimately, application development, deployment, and ongoing management doesn’t have to be so difficult. Ansible Core provides you with the end-to-end capabilities your organization needs to quickly and easily start managing existing applications, even helping move them to the cloud. Ansible Tower further extends the power of Ansible Core by enabling push-button access to the various Playbooks and Roles that define your environments and applications.⚡
📝Conclusion👩💻
With Ansible, IT admins can begin automating away the drudgery from their daily tasks. Automation frees admins up to focus on efforts that help deliver more value to the business by speeding time to application delivery, and building on a culture of success. Ultimately, Ansible gives teams the one thing they can never get enough of: time. Allowing smart people to focus on smart things.⚡
Ansible is a simple automation language that can perfectly describe an IT application infrastructure. It’s easy-to-learn, self-documenting, and doesn’t require a grad-level computer science degree to read. Automation shouldn’t be more complex than the tasks it’s replacing.⚡
“✅Right Tool Make the Things easier…👩💻✌️!!”
ThankYou for reading(*~*)🌻
