Adoption of DevOps Practices Utilizing Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Molecule

Adoption of DevOps practices into an organization structure ensures the application of the automation tools that help to optimize and leverage the project life cycle, improve the delivery process, and prevent major system failures.

In our article, we are analyzing the key components of DevOps processes and the successful implementation of Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Molecule into our client’s multi-server infrastructure.

What Is DevOps and Why Is It Crucial for Business?

One of the best explanations to what is DevOps was introduced by Gartner stating that DevOps stands for transformations in the IT industry that aim at orienting towards the IT service delivery employing agile and system-oriented approach. The key behind DevOps success is simple: it bridges development and operations teams so that they function as a unit.

To establish seamless processes during the delivery, it is crucial to consider DevOps implementations. Continuous deployments of the new features, as well as the continuous feedback, are amidst the key components of how essential DevOps is for the organization’s management. It accelerates, systemizes, and tests the environments, hence, improves the quality of the product and helps meet the requirements of the clients.

Amidst the main principles of DevOps highlighting the methodology are Automation, Agility, Continuous Integration and Deployment, Collaborative Environment, Automated Acceptance Testing, Peer Quality Review, Trusting Environment

TOP 5 Benefits of the DevOps Adoption

As mentioned above, DevOps is the philosophy that concentrates on the principles of shared responsibility, agile approach and collaboration. These are extremely beneficial for businesses as they

• Decrease the production and deployment time, hence, release time of the product to the market;
• Increase the ROI;
• Better collaboration experience within the team;
• Improve efficiency;
• Detection and correction of issues at the early stages of the product development.

With all the tools utilized by the DevOps engineers, the product owners are definitely having a lot more advantages for their customers as well. Owing to the automation of the multiple processes, high functionality, and flexibility, the customers get to receive a positive experience from encountering the DevOps approach implemented in the product life cycle.

With DevOps engineers staying atop of the niche requires constant learning and growing the skillset. Amidst Agiliway’s latest projects was the migration of our client’s organization infrastructure to Ansible with adding Ansible Tower and Ansible Molecule to automate the deployment of Ansible playbooks, reduce production time, cut costs and improve the overall management processes.

Ansible Update and Ansible Tower Configuring

After learning the client’s requirements and challenges, Agiliway experts prepared a detailed plan that contained all the issues analyzed and solutions to help improve business operations, automate the existing processes and bring maximum cost-benefit.

Since Ansible is a great tool for automating cloud deployments through automation playbooks and it was initially used for configuration management, our first step was updating it to the latest version and configure Ansible Tower to enable the explicit system management of the Ansible scripts for such operations as

• defining RBAC (role-based access controls)
• auditing of events
• deployment control
• AWS support, and more.

Ansible Tower (or its free version Ansible AWX) is a significant tool for data and credentials encryption, hence, it ensures information security and prevents sensitive data abuse. Moreover, its peculiarity of having multiple modules for different types of tasks ensures safe automation.

Ansible Molecule Installment & Configuration

Ansible Molecule tool was introduced to the multi-server environment for testing the Ansible roles and help during the development process. Molecule is perfect for testing within multiple environments, infrastructures, frameworks, operating systems, etc.

The suggested solution has considerably helped to reduce the cost of the possible errors occurring in the future, i.e. if there is a task common for multiple playbooks, any changes to it may cause a system failure. Considering the potential risks, we set up the Ansible Molecule analyzing the task through all the playbooks to detect any errors and our engineers fixed them immediately.

Eventually, the implementation saves a lot of time, effort and human resources required to fix the issue when it occurs later in the operation process. Its main approach lies in establishing the constant roles that are clear and simple to comprehend and support.

Summary

Agiliway has obtained extensive expertise in providing the most advanced DevOps service with their experienced professionals who help our clients optimize and automate the maximum processes in their organizations. To succeed in the niche, it is crucial to acquire the philosophy and methodology of DevOps, understand it and its key principles.

Utilizing Ansible, Ansible Tower and Ansible Molecule helped our client to automate the processes and transform the management processes of his multi-server environment. Since, the infrastructure contains multiple tasks, scripts, playbooks that work together, it was crucial to set up automatic testing and reduce the potential error occurrence. In its turn, this significantly saves costs and time on training staff and reduces time spent on solving the issues. Moreover, the client now can manage all the components of his system, grant access to a specific playbook or task and not the whole system, assign roles, etc.

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