Complete IT automation using Ansible

Muhammad Tabish Khanday
3 min readJul 8, 2021

Ansible is a software tool that provides simple but powerful automation for cross-platform computer support. It is primarily intended for IT professionals, who use it for application deployment, updates on workstations and servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, intra-service orchestration, and nearly anything a systems administrator does on a weekly or daily basis. Ansible doesn’t depend on agent software and has no additional security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy.

Ansible seamlessly unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.

Regardless of where you start with Ansible, you’ll find our simple, powerful and agentless automation platform has the capabilities to solve your most challenging problems.

USE CASES solved by Ansible:

PROVISIONING

Your apps have to live somewhere. If you’re PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible and Red Hat® Ansible® Tower help streamline the process.

CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.

APPLICATION DEPLOYMENT

When you define your application with Ansible and manage the deployment with Ansible Tower, teams are able to effectively manage the entire application lifecycle from development to production.

CONTINUOUS DELIVERY

Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.

SECURITY AUTOMATION

When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning, and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.

ORCHESTRATION

Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.

Ansible puts Google Technology at Your Fingertips

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides scalable infrastructure and solutions to meet the needs of your organization. GCP offers on-demand instances, software-defined networking, storage and databases, and big data solutions — and they’re all available at your fingertips. GCP enables your applications to take advantage of Google’s significant infrastructure, utilizing their best-of-breed technology and innovation, and only pay for what you need when you need it.

Ansible and Google Native Integration

The Ansible/GCP integration gives you everything you need to manage your IT infrastructure. From provisioning instances and autoscaling, custom networks and load balancing, and even managing DNS and cloud storage, it’s all provided. Use the Ansible/GCP tutorial and examples in your Playbooks.

Solutions That Grow with Your Organization

Take advantage of GCP, the way you want to:

Testing/Continuous Integration

  • Use Ansible to launch instances in any GCP Zone, configure networking setups to accurately simulate real-world scenarios
  • Deploy your code how you want: private disk images, startup scripts pointing to your own package repository, and more — all within your native Ansible Playbooks
  • Tear-down instances when you’re done: right after a test or after a review with the team and even keep a snapshot of the disk

Production Deployment

  • Use GCP Managed Instance Groups (Playbook example) and autoscaling to ensure your application can meet the needs of its users
  • Easily use Cross-Region Load Balancing to have your application served by the closest available zone
  • Enable Service Accounts with specific access, enabling only those who need it to run your playbooks in production

Leverage Containers Without the Hassle

  • Easily deploy containers in Google’s managed container environment (Container Engine)
  • Store and access your container images in our Container Registry
  • Autoscaling, advanced networking, and Logging giving you full control to understand and tune your cluster

Sources: https://www.ansible.com/use-cases https://www.ansible.com/integrations/cloud/google-cloud-platform

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