If you’re working in IT, you may find yourself doing the same tasks over and over again. What if there was a way to solve a problem once and then automate the solution going forward? This is where Ansible and Ansible developers for hire come in handy.
Ansible is a simple yet powerful IT automation engine that thousands of companies are using to eliminate the drudgery and inefficiencies of monotonous tasks and accelerate DevOps initiatives. Before you go much further, though, it’s important to take the time to learn what an Ansible developer does and how they can help you take advantage of this cutting-edge tool.
What Is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source software tool that provides powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily used by IT professionals for application deployment, intra-service orchestration, cloud provisioning, configuration management, and just about every task a systems administrator performs.
Ansible provides large productivity gains to a variety of automation challenges. The tool itself is also very simple but powerful enough to automate complex multi-tier application environments.
In addition, while Ansible is at the forefront of the automation movement, it is also helpful to everyday users. It requires no programming skills and allows users to configure entire networks of computers. Instructions for Ansible are in simple, everyday language, making the files easy to understand–whether you’re a beginner or an Ansible expert.
How Ansible Is Used in Business
Here are several of the primary ways organizations of varying sizes use Ansible:
Ansible for DevOps
Ansible is currently the most popular DevOps tool for the orchestration, automation, configuration, and management of IT structures. It makes DevOps easier by automating the implementation of internally-generated applications to production programs.
Using Ansible for DevOps has several benefits, including quick acceleration of feedback loops, dependable installations, faster deployment, and coordination of IT architectures. Other benefits include rapid adaptation and scaling in response to demands.
Configuration Management
Ansible is a simple, trustworthy, and convenient configuration management solution. If you have prior experience in IT, setting it up is easy. All you need are passwords or a secure socket shell (SSH) key to begin monitoring machines.
When used as a configuration management tool, Ansible stores the current state of your systems and helps maintain that state. Automating configuration management with Ansible can help you improve system recovery after a critical event. It lets you track your resources and helps prevent you from having to repeat tasks, such as reinstalling the same package twice.
Multi-Tier Installations
Ansible delivers simple, rapid deployment of applications with several tiers. There is no need to develop a code base to manage processes–all you need to do is define the required actions in a playbook, and Ansible determines how to get the processes to produce the desired outcome.
This eliminates the need to set up applications on each machine manually. Instead, Ansible uses SSH to communicate with remote networks and implement instructions when a module is launched from a control device.
Compliance and Security
Security teams can configure a sequence of jobs using Ansible to automate investigations or remediations. It can integrate third-party services, which helps security teams identify trends, monitor anomalies, and correlate disparate events.
Applying automation to security processes can help you identify, validate, and combat threats faster without manual intervention. If a security incident does occur, teams can use Ansible to respond to threats and address affected systems across your environment more quickly.
Provisioning
Ansible can be used to provide the underlying infrastructure of your environment, network devices, and servers. It can also add computer hosts, install services, and provision resources, applications, and services inside your cloud environment.
You can use an Ansible playbook to describe the desired state of your infrastructure and then have Ansible provision it. This ensures that you are able to provide the same environment every time.
What Are the Advantages of Using Ansible?
Ansible is the most popular open-source tool on GitHub today, with more than 250,000 downloads per month. Why are businesses so eager to automate using Ansible? Here are some of the top advantages it offers:
- Simplistic: There are no special coding skills required to use Ansible’s playbooks.
- Agentless: There is no need to install other software or firewall ports on your client systems, nor do you need to set up a separate management structure.
- Efficient: Because you don’t have to install extra software, there’s more room for application resources on your server.
- Flexible: You can fully customize the entire application environment based on your needs, no matter where it’s deployed.
- Secure: With certified, supported integrations, Ansible is 100% predictable, reliable, and safe.
Summing Up
Are you ready to augment your digital transformation and enhance your DevOps approach with Ansible? If you are, find the best freelance Ansible developers and research the cost of hiring an Ansible developer on Guru to kickstart your automation journey today!
