ComputerWeekly: Ansible’s secret agentless route to IT automation
ComputerWeekly recently posted a great breakdown of Ansible's role in IT automation.
Ansible Inc (upper case) is a company that makes "agentless" orchestration and configuration management tools in the form of an automation engine designed to help deploy both applications and the wider software systems that they exist within.
The core technology proposition here is a developer play yes -- but it's also an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation because Ansible avoids the need to write custom scripts or code to manage applications.
Read the full atricle on ComputerWeekly
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Case Study: Cogapp
Our latest Ansible Case study features Cogapp, who helps the BBC, MoMA, and others organize their digital media, use Ansible for environment provisioning and content deployment.
We use Ansible to build out the servers for deployments and to provision development VMs for our team. We also use Ansible to populate sample content for our development environments.
Our development team is 12 people; at least half of them have written or edited playbooks, and all of them have run playbooks to provision environments. When we started working with Ansible, each new project would cannibalize the last one and take some of the Ansible content. Now we have built a more standard library of content so we can spin up new projects quicker. We also use Galaxy roles wherever possible to standardize our server hardening playbooks so they can be shared across deployments.
Ansible Tower 2.1 Released
Today we're excited to release Ansible Tower 2.1, the next version of the UI, Server, and REST endpoint for Ansible Tower. This release adds several major new features:
Surveys may now be created with our easy form builder and can be attached to any job template in Ansible Tower. When launching a job with an attached survey, the system will prompt the user to answer any number of questions - multiple choice, numeric, text, etc. The results of these questions will then be available as variables in Ansible Tower jobs. Surveys are graphically constructed from within the interface with no programming required.
Portal Mode is a simplified view into Ansible Tower. If you have users who are not Ansible experts that need to run Ansible jobs, Portal Mode presents a simple two column view. On one side, there's a list of all the job templates they can launch. On the other side, there's a list of all the completed or in-progress jobs they can view, to know how their job is running.
Combined, these two features provide solid options for users that want to provide self-service features to others. For instance, admins can let developers or QA departments provision Continue reading
Upcoming Ansible Training Classes
We are pleased to announce to training courses. These courses are taught by members of the Ansible Team and will give a great look at how to get started using Ansible.
In this course, students will explore the origins of Ansible, how Ansible approaches automation, and the common use cases for Ansible. Students will learn about key Ansible concepts, including playbooks, plays, tasks, and modules, and the course will go through step-by-step creation of a playbook to deploy a full application from beginning to end.
The cost is $199.
Choose from one of the dates below.
Greg DeKoenigsberg’s Blog: A Good Year for Ansible
Ansible's VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, compiled a nice statistical look back at our 2014.
Here is a nice example of Ansible's growth on GitHub:
Read the full post on Greg's blog.
GigaOm: NASA Uses Ansible to launch web infrastructure into the cloud
GigaOm published a great article on how NASA launches their web infrastructure into the cloud today. The article features our own Jonathan Davila.
To help with the nitty gritty details of transferring those applications to AWS and setting up new servers, NASA used the Ansible configuration-management tool, said Davila. When InfoZen came, the apps were stored in a co-located data center where they weren’t being managed well, he explained, and many server operating systems weren’t being updated, leaving them vulnerable to security threats.
Without the configuration-management tool, Davila said that it would “probably take us a few days to patch every server in the environment” using shell scripts. Now, the team can “can patch all Linux servers in, like, 15 minutes.”
Read the full article on GigaOm.
Read our case study on How NASA Uses Ansible Tower.
Brian Coca: Ansible for Enterprise
Our own Brian Coca presented at the recent OpenStack for Enterprises NYC Meetup and talked about how large companies are using Ansible and Ansible Tower.
Check out his presentation below.
More information on Ansible Tower or Ansible Services.
Download a free preview copy of Ansible: Up & Running
Ansible Automation on AWS: Webinar Recording
We were proud to have DualSpark join us for a great webinar this week on automation on AWS using Ansible. Presenting from Ansible was Dave Johnson and Patrick McClory handled the discussion from the DualSpark side.
Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts
- Using Ansible to manage infrastructure in multi-tier deployments
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
Be sure to follow
Ansible on Twitter to be informed of all our upcoming webinars.
Download a free trial of Ansible Tower
here.
Ansible Named a Top 10 Open Source Project by OpenSource.com
We are pleased to announce that Ansible has been named a Top 10 Open Source Project for 2014 by Opensource.com. Be sure to watch Michael DeHaan's presentation on why your IT infrastructure should be boring, read his interview with Opensource.com's Jen Krieger and learn about one of his favorite Star Trek quotes.
View the full list here.
Compliance and Automation Using Ansible
Compliance is a big deal in many industries, from e-commerce and PCI, to healthcare and HIPAA, to federal government and FedRAMP. At the core, compliance is all about making sure that IT systems are secure. The controls for the various industries will inevitably have some overlap; there are fundamental security controls that (should) apply to all IT systems. However, as technology advances, even the fundamental controls need to be refreshed in order to address the ever increasing advancements in security threats.When the need comes for your IT environment to be both compliant and automated, Ansible makes the most sense.
Why? For simple but very powerful reasons; readability, encryption, architecture and transport.
Architecture:
For starters, Ansible requires the smallest architecture. In it’s simplest form, none whatsoever, just its installation on your laptop (presuming linux or OSX). Even in our enterprise offering it is a single server. With Ansible there is no notion of Masters, Slaves, Masters of Masters, etc.
Secondly, you don’t/shouldn’t need to change anything. If you run a linux shop, SSH over port 22 is probably already in place for all servers and if you’ve been doing any sort of Windows automation, you likely already have remote Continue reading
Ansible’s Mark Phillips at DOXLON
Ansible's Mark Phillips recently presented at DOXLON in London.
The Presentation:
The Video:
Follow DOXLON on Twitter and join the Meetup here.
Ansible Makes Work Easier
Michael DeHaan, the founder of Ansible, gave a lightning talk at the Opensource.com event prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. He talks about how Ansible can make work easier, less stressful and more efficient.
Watch the video:
See the full post at OpenSource.com
Ansible on AWS: Free Best Practices Webinar on December 17th!
We'd like to invite you to a free webinar on December 17th featuring Ansible and our friends at DualSpark, an expert Amazon Web Services consulting partner.
Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts
- Using Ansible to manage infrastructure in multi-tier deployments
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
- Using CloudFormation and Ansible to manage configuration for more complicated scenarios
- How Tower adds visibility to systems at runtime
Presenters:
Patrick McClory (DualSpark) is a software engineer and architect who fell into 'ops by accident.' Through years of experience in multi-platform and multi-layered systems, he's honed his craft and learned how to build systems at scale that both leverage the best of breed software solutions and frameworks as well as the flexibility of highly configurable infrastructure before it was cool to call it infrastructure-as-code. Today, Patrick helps to run the boutique consulting firm DualSpark Partners which focuses on helping clients make a move to the cloud using cloud-native strategies from infrastructure management through to application design and development. Follow Patrick and DualSpark on Twitter.
Dave Johnson (Ansible) started his career at Red Hat prior to its IPO, ultimately building and leading Continue reading
Ansible Chicago Meetup Recap
If you don't follow Ansible's VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, on Twitter you may have missed his recap of the Ansible Chicago Meetup.
Dean Strelau and Rick Pollak of Trunk Club invited us to host our inaugural Ansible Chicago meetup at their headquarters in downtown Chicago. This is often how it happens: a company that uses Ansible volunteers to host a meetup, and gets the benefit of being seen as a technology leader in their community; we get to show the local community how a prominent user puts Ansible to best use. Everybody wins! We’ve done similar meetups in New York, San Francisco, London, and many other cities.
Trunk Club, though, was one of the most fascinating yet. For those who aren’t familiar with the business model,check out their site for a detailed description. The short version: they talk to you about what you like, they use business intelligence to help their stylists pick out the best clothes for you, and then they send you a trunk full of clothes they think you’ll like. And then you keep what you like, send back what you don’t, and they charge you appropriately. Great model, Continue reading
Ansible 1.8 Now Released!
We're sitting out a few days from Thanksgiving in the U.S., and it's time once again to give thanks to people in our free software community.
On a related note, a while back James Martin and I were having a conversation about what the collective noun for Ansible-using-people was. We came up with "Ansiblings" - somewhat because it reminds me of Starcraft zerglings, because we are numerous, aggressive, and get things done fast-- but that's not so much why. More so, because Ansible users are kind of a family. This year, our way of giving thanks to our family won't be with a tryptofan-soaked turkey (Wikipedia seems to say that's a myth but what do they know?), but rather with another great release of Ansible.
YES -- Ansible 1.8 is now available on PyPi and our official Ubuntu PPA, and will soon be available via other packaging mirrors. And at this point, Ansible's reached an amazing 919 contributors on GitHub, with over 8400stars and 2600 forks, and you can find a large list of dedicated meetup groups all over too.
One of the most notable features in Ansible 1.8 has been the long Continue reading
Ansible Tower Demo Webinar
We have been running monthly Ansible Tower demo webinars over the past few months. These webinars are a great way to see Ansible Tower in action and be able to ask questions and have them answered by our own Dave Johnson.
Our Latest Tower Demo Webinar
Be sure to check our events page for all of our upcoming AnsibleFests, trainings and webinars.
Case Studies: Ruan & Lifesum
We are excited to announce two new case studies.
Read how Ruan and Lifesum are using Ansible to automate and simplify their workflows.
If you'd like to be featured in an Ansible case study, please contact us here.
AnsibleFest London Tickets Available NOW
Join us for our FIRST AnsibleFest outside the United States!
We are offering Early Bird pricing from now until December 31st.
AnsibleFest is a day-long conference bringing together Ansible users, developers and industry partners to share best-practices, case studies and Ansible news. If you are a developer, sysadmin, operations director or devops practioner, AnsibleFest is for you. Past speakers have included Twitter, Google, Rackspace, EdX, HP, Twilio, Cumulus Networks, Telescope.tv and many more - as well as members of the Ansible Team.
Where is it happening?
AnsibleFest London 2015 will be held in central London at the Lancaster London. Lunch, coffee, snacks and wi-fi will be served... and please stick around for our happy hour at the end of the event.
Want to speak or sponsor?
AnsibleFest London 2015 call for presentations is OPEN. Email your presentation ideas to [email protected].
If you are interested in sponsoring AnsibleFest London 2015, email [email protected].
Buy your Early Bird Tickets TODAY!
Cumulus and Ansible
This past September Michael DeHaan took part in a joint Ansible and Cumulus Networks webinar on how Ansible and Cumulus can radically simplify the nature of modern IT management, and how well they can play together.
Learn more here
Watch a quick demo video of how to use Ansible to automate network switches running cumulus linux.
