Ansible Case Studies
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The document discusses the benefits and use cases of Ansible for automation in various organizations, including BinckBank, Hootsuite, and NASA. Each organization faced challenges related to server management and sought simplicity and efficiency through Ansible's agentless and powerful automation framework. The speakers highlight how Ansible has improved their infrastructure management, reduced complexity, and enhanced collaboration among technical and non-technical staff.
Ansible Case Studies
- 1. CASE STUDIES: NASA AND FRIENDS Greg DeKoenigsberg (@gregdek)
- 2. GOOD MORNING! (Who are you?)
- 3. THIS IS A TALK FOR BUSINESS FOLKS (But we can go anywhere you like!)
- 4. ANSIBLE USERS HAVE A LOT OF USE CASES Let's talk about a few of them today.
- 5. WHAT IS ANSIBLE, ANYWAY?
- 6. CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT Kinda like Puppet / Chef
- 7. ORCHESTRATION Kinda like mCollective
- 8. APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT Kinda like... Fabric / Capistrano
- 9. ALL OF THESE THINGS TOGETHER Kinda like... nothing
- 11. NEXT GENERATION AUTOMATION FRAMEWORK
- 12. SIMPLE (Get started on your lunch hour) AGENTLESS (Got ssh? Ansible is for you) POWERFUL (Batteries included)
- 13. BINCKBANK
- 14. About BinckBank Based in Amsterdam, NL Largest Dutch online discount broker 590 employees 760,000+ accounts 600 UNIX servers Mark Maas, UNIX/Linux System Administrator
- 15. THE CHALLENGE
- 16. We have 600 UNIX servers in house. We have a lot of specialty environments that we need to create while at the same time managing our production environment.
- 17. Our problem was complexity in the datacenter. We wanted automation but we also wanted simplicity and to not have to send people to training in order to use the product.
- 18. BEFORE ANSIBLE
- 19. In the past we did our own scripting for menial tasks over a lot of late nights of pizza.
- 20. WITH ANSIBLE
- 21. Ansible is quite fun to use right away-—as soon as you write five lines of code it works.
- 22. With SSH and Ansible I can send commands to 500 servers without having even used the servers before.
- 23. We are completely focused on automating as much as possible in our datacenter and going beyond Unix to create more stuff for more people to do be able to do more.
- 24. MOVING FORWARD
- 25. Recently I purchased a license for Ansible Tower. I would like to give non-technical users access to it and open up the technical side to people who have no idea what I am talking about. With Tower, my Linux guys can access our templates without having to do any coding. Tower opens up Ansible to the rest of company.
- 26. HOOTSUITE
- 27. About HootSuite Based in Vancouver, BC, Canada Social media management ~400 employees Over 8 million users 75% of Fortune 500 uses HootSuite Beier Cai, Director of Technology
- 28. THE CHALLENGE
- 29. Our infrastructure is not scripted, repeatable or immutable.
- 30. Rebuilding a server relies on limited documentation and mostly memory.
- 31. Lack of repeatability makes automating our infrastructure and application deployment difficult.
- 32. There was one time we had to spend over a month of an engineer’s time to rebuild a server that had lived for 2 years with random config changes by ops engineers along the way, with limited documentation.
- 33. BEFORE ANSIBLE
- 34. We had limited experience with Puppet, but didn’t quite like it because 1) it needs agents, and we don’t like agents; and 2) we favor immutability over snowflake factory for infrastructure management.
- 35. WITH ANSIBLE
- 36. Ops and devs both feel safer, literally. Before they were always worried about ‘what if the server dies’. They aren’t worried about this anymore after all servers are properly ‘Ansiblized’.
- 37. With the help of Vagrant we can test server builds locally as many times as we want until it works, instead of testing it on EC2 cloud which is remote and always slow.
- 38. Increase our bus factor from 1 to infinite! Before, only 1 or 2 people know how a server was built from the beginning. With Ansible, storing playbooks in source control gives everyone the ability to rebuild the server at any time.
- 39. MOVING FORWARD
- 40. We want to build out "Devops" into HootSuite, and our vision is "Software Engineers are engaged in the entire cycle of designing, implementing, deploying and maintaining their software across all environments".
- 41. NASA
- 42. About NASA They put men on the freaking moon
- 43. About NASA WESTprime 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 Jonathan Davila, Senior DevOps Lead, InfoZen
- 44. THE CHALLENGE
- 47. WESTPrime’s initial focus was to move roughly 65 applications off the old data center as quickly as possible in a seemingly impossible timeline.
- 48. All of a sudden we had an environment spanning multiple VPCs and AWS accounts with no way of centrally managing it.
- 49. We were faced with a very ugly scenario where even simple things like ensuring every SysAdmin had access to every server, or simple patching were extremely burdensome.
- 50. BEFORE ANSIBLE
- 51. Previously, NASA WESTPrime was using a lot of shell scripts. There was a lot of "manually ssh-in-and-do-x" type of work being done.
- 52. We then created a demo day in which we invited the automation players to demonstrate the enterprise flavors of their product.
- 53. After quite a long day of deep level demos and Q&A, and a week of analysis with the technical team we decided unanimously that Ansible was the best fit for us.
- 54. 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
- 55. WITH ANSIBLE
- 56. NASA web app servers are being patched routinely and automatically through Tower with a very simple 10-line Ansible playbook.
- 57. Every single week www.nasa.gov is updated via Ansible, generally only taking about 5 minutes to do, including the mobile version of nasa.gov.
- 58. Because of Ansible we are able to organize our inventory of AWS resources in a very granular way that was not at all possible before.
- 59. One time we faced some strict deadlines for monitoring and we didn’t have time to deploy Nagios agents (due to lengthy approval workflows in place) to monitor RAM and CPU. So what did we do? We did a very simple hack to be able to monitor CPU and RAM with Ansible in near real-time (no agent required!).
- 60. Ansible was leveraged to remediate both OpenSSL issues this year in ridiculous time (leadership was blown away).
- 61. It is also used to ensure our environment is compliant with necessary Federal security standards as outlined by FedRAMP and other regulatory requirements.
- 62. There is a level of comfort and confidence that Ansible has been able to provide that simply was not there before.
- 63. MOVING FORWARD
- 64. We are working on moving many applications into cycles of Continuous Integration and Deployment, which will be leveraging Ansible as the conductor of these architectures.
- 65. The moment 1.7 is released, Ansible will be used to manage our stack of Windows servers and do the same magic we've been doing with Linux.
- 66. The end goal will be for our sysadmins to only need to SSH/WINRM into servers manually for troubleshooting. All server changes will eventually happen exclusively through Ansible (and the occasional CloudFormation tempate).
- 67. A TWEET BEFORE WE GO
- 68. Adam Werewolf (@adamwwolf) I use @ansible to do just about everything. If you say "I don't have time to set it up" you're who it's for--you don't have time *not* to. 11:20 AM - 21 Oct 2014 https://twitter.com/adamwwolf/status/524626206470053889
- 69. THE WORLD IS CHANGING
- 70. THANKS / Q+A greg@ansible.com @gregdek