How NASA is using Ansible tool Case study
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code.
No one likes repetitive tasks. 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.
“Automation is an essential and strategic component of modernization and digital transformation. Modern, dynamic environments need a new type of management solution that can improve speed, scale and stability across the enterprise IT environment”
Ansible is:-
Simple
- Human readable automation
- No special coding skills needed
- Tasks executed in order
Powerful
- App deployment
- Configuration management
- Workflow orchestration
Agentless
- Agentless architecture
- Uses OpenSSH and WinRM
- No agents to exploit or update
Let's see how NASA is using Ansible tool to solve their challenges
THE 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.
SOLUTION:-
Leverage Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment
Ansible Tower provided a dashboard that provided the status summary of all hosts and jobs which allowed NASA to group all contents and manage access permissions across different departments. It also helped to split up the organization by associating content and control permission for groups as well.
Ansible Tower is a web-based interface for managing Ansible. One of the top items in Ansible users’ wishlists was an easy-to-use UI for managing quick deployments and monitoring one’s configurations. Ansible management came up with Ansible Tower in response.Further, Ansible divided the tasks among teams by assigning various roles. It managed the clean up of old job history, activity streams, data marked for deletion and system tracking info. Refer to the diagram below to understand how Ansible has simplified the work of NASA.
As a result of implementing the 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 an 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
After moving those apps, NASA had to define a change-management process for its applications so that each time something got altered or updated, there was documentation to help keep track of the changes.
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.
