Transforming Your Business While Unifying Your People and Processes

Operating system teams need to support environments that are more dynamic and more dispersed than ever before. 

An end to end fully automated approach to provisioning, patching and Day 2 management can assist in providing faster, more secure operating environment across Linux and Windows, on-premise and cloud workloads.

The Ansible way allows an organisation to augment their current investments in tools, people, teams and process, by providing a common language of automation across these silos, which help bridge the gap between security, applications and operations, to meet modern business requirements.

Traditionally in large, complex IT environments, it is common to silo the functions of Operations, Security/Cyber-Security and Applications teams.

There are many benefits to this approach, including uplifting the security competency of an organisation through specialisation and the segregation of duties to meet compliance and governance requirements.

However, the growing needs for IT to move faster than ever before, is challenging this traditional siloed way of working, providing the opportunity for these teams to work closer to meet business requirements, whilst balancing speed and risk.

The Ansible way allows an organisation to augment their current investments in tools, people, teams and process, by providing a common language of automation across these silos, which help bridge the gap between security, applications and operations, to meet modern business requirements.

Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises, yet true automation of the network stack is nearly non-existent. When organizations are automating networks, they’re using proprietary vendor-specific tooling that requires significant training to use.

Ansible’s simple automation framework means that previously isolated network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support for both legacy and open network infrastructure devices. Network devices and systems can now be included in an organization's overall automation strategy for a holistic approach to application workload management.

The Ansible way allows the network team in an organization to:

1. Use the same simple, powerful, and agentless automation framework IT operations and development are already using
2. Use a data model (a playbook or role) that’s separate from the execution layer (Ansible automation engine) that easily spans heterogeneous network hardware
3. Benefit from a wide variety of community and vendor-generated playbook and role content to help accelerate network automation projects

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a method to frequently deliver apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of app development. The main concepts attributed to CI/CD are continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. CI/CD is a solution to the problems integrating new code can cause for development and operations teams.

Ansible contains numerous tools and features to make it an ideal CI/CD solution. These include the ability to finely orchestrate multi-tier, multi-step processes in zero-downtime rolling update workflows. This is made possible by Ansible’s unique architecture, and coupled with its agentless approach, it is easy to establish simple human-readable representations of what were previously complex manual IT processes. The ability to tightly integrate with CI systems like Jenkins also means that all aspects of IT processes can be automated.

The Ansible way looks at how Ansible automation can put deployment on full autopilot. "Full autopilot" of course means enabling the true promise of agile processes: delivering change faster, with fewer errors, and with fewer expensive context shifts. Eliminating outage windows, and especially manual change errors, is something that is expressly critical for any core internal IT service or high-traffic web property.

Cloud is integral to every enterprise digital transformation strategy. A hybrid cloud delivers a consistent platform across bare metal, virtual, private, and public cloud environments. This unlocks a set of capabilities essential in today’s world, including speed, agility, and portability.

To avoid lock-in, hybrid and multi cloud are the default choices for enterprise. However, this also implies increased complexity for resource provisioning, configuration, security and application deployment. And the best approach to handle that is to make use of automation to support the management of hybrid cloud as code.

The Ansible way allows an organisation to mitigate the complexity that these conditions produced and provides faster responses to changing business requirements. Bringing together teams for improved collaboration, these new services and offerings ultimately connect business managers with automation leaders to better align automation strategies with the needs of the business and expand how automation can be invoked.

Yes, your environment is complex, and headed to hybrid, if it isn’t already. But when you look at the wide variety of DevOps tooling available and the tools currently being used by your systems administration, development, and network teams, how can you start to change the way your teams interact across the whole system?

The answer? You need a tool that can act as the glue layer automating across services and applications no matter where they are. Once one person on your team learns how to do something, they can capture their solution in an Ansible Playbook and enable everyone to use it.

The Ansible way looks at how an organization can enable the spirit of DevOps by connecting teams and tools to automate the workflows in their day-to-day operations via a common automation platform. Some of the common IT tools can include ITSM such as ServiceNow, Application Performance Monitoring tool such as DynaTrace, Monitoring systems such as Zabbix and other IaC tools such as Terraform.