How Ansible helps AWS?

The use case of Ansible with AWS & the way it helps AWS to work in a more effective way

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy — and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

How Ansible works?

Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called “Ansible modules” to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished.

Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and there are no servers, daemons, or databases required. Typically you’ll work with your favorite terminal program, a text editor, and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.

Ansible with AWS

Ansible enables you to automate cloud deployments. You can use Ansible to manage applications and services using automation playbooks. Each playbook defines a set of configurations, which is used consistently across cloud environments.

Ansible is an open source tool that you can use to automate your AWS deployments. You can use it to define, deploy, and manage applications and services using automation playbooks. These playbooks enable you to define configurations once and deploy those configurations consistently across environments.

Safe automation

Another benefit of using Ansible is ensuring safe automation. Misconfigurations are a major vulnerability in cloud environments, but automation can help you ensure that only permitted configurations are deployed. However, you don’t want everyone on your team to be able to automatically deploy anything they want.

To prevent this, Ansible offers the Ansible Tower. Ansible Tower is a web-based UI that you can use to define role-based access controls (RBAC), monitor deployments, and audit events. It enables you to set and authorize user actions on a granular level. Ansible Tower also includes features for encrypting credentials and data.

Ansible modules supporting AWS
When using Ansible, there are dozens of modules you can choose from that support AWS services. These modules include functionality for:

• Autoscaling groups
• CloudFormation, CloudTrail, and CloudWatch
• DynamoDB, ElastiCache, and Relational Database Service (RDS)
• Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Identity Access Manager (IAM) and Security Groups
• AWS Lambda
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

Autoscaling with Ansible Pull

To autoscale your resources, you can either use the built-in Amazon autoscaling features or you can use Ansible modules. These modules can configure your autoscaling policies and grant finer control.

One module you can use is ansible-pull. Pull is a command-line tool that you can use to fetch and run playbooks. To apply this to autoscaling you can create images with a built-in ansible-pull invocation. Then, when a host comes online, it will automatically pull your autoscaling playbook. This eliminates the need to wait until the next Ansible command cycle occurs.

Ansible AWS with Cloud Volumes ONTAP

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP supports up to a capacity of 368TB, and supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data.

Cloud Manager is completely API driven and is highly geared towards automating cloud operations. Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Cloud Manager deployment through infrastructure- as- code automation helps to address the DevOps challenges faced by organizations when it comes to configuring enterprise cloud storage solutions. When implementing infrastructure as code, Cloud Volumes ONTAP and Cloud Manager go hand in hand with Terraform to achieve the level of efficiency expected in large scale cloud storage deployment in AWS.

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