Ansible Tower makes Automation Scalable!

On 28th December 2020, I have attended this session on Industry use case on automation using ansible by LinuxWorld Informatics Pvt Ltd and Redhat.

I got to know more about Ansible Tower and how it can solve enterprise-level use cases. I already had knowledge about ansible but knowing what ansible tower can do, I am planning to explore more on it in the near future. Attending this session actually allowed my mind to think out of the box use cases which can be solved by ansible. One such use case which was discussed in the session was ChatOps. Ya, even I had the same reaction when I actually heard this term, and to my surprise, it was actually a small but effective use case. We can integrate chat apps like slack to ansible tower and get notifications on it as the workflow (think of it as a pipeline) continues till the end. This can really save a lot of time for developers.

I got to know that there are some things that we have to set in our mind before doing something for the automation use case.

1. Focus on many small tasks rather than a big complex process.
2. Review what others have automated.
3. Treat automation like software.
4. Think out of the box.

Ansible tower is so in demand and used widely because of the following reasons it provides:

1. API based access, hence we can create triggers for it.
2. Simple Web Application to handle Ansible Tower.
3. Role-Based Access Control.
4. Scheduling of tasks.
5. Notification
6. 3'rd party integration.
7. Best security practice for credential handling and many more.

One of the best things, I personally like about it, which ansible lacks was, what happens if the server with Ansible (controller node) fails?

This was one of the questions which, I had from the beginning of my ansible journey. I came to know that an ansible tower can be deployed on a cluster sharing a common PostgreSQL database to have everything in synchronization with high availability architecture.

We saw many use cases and concepts of ansible tower-like:

1. How we can integrate it with notifications
2. How we can integrate it with almost all cloud platforms
3. How we can make a workflow with interrupts for confirmation
4. Orchestration of jobs and how we can even collaborate multiple use cases or playbooks into one flow and many more.

I am really looking forward to contributing to the ansible community by making custom modules and roles, stay tuned for the same.