Sign in
Categories
Your Saved List Become a Channel Partner Sell in AWS Marketplace Amazon Web Services Home Help

Reviews from AWS customer

1 AWS reviews
  • 1
  • 4 star
    0
  • 3 star
    0
  • 2 star
    0
  • 1 star
    0

External reviews

365 reviews
from and

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.


    Aiman N.

The Swiss Army knife of automation scripting. My favorite automation tool.

  • November 01, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
- Great flexibility, with proper code organization you can automate any process you want at any complexity!
- Ansible is very easy to setup, being an agent-less tool. You can get started without installing any software on the target machine where you would like to execute your automation
- Great abstractions: roles (modules), inventory hosts and groups, facts (node information) and group-level as well as host-level variables. You can implement very complex automations in a very clean approach with Ansible abstractions.
- A lot of modules available at your disposal. From simple file copying, to templated files, to services and packages management. You will probably forget bash syntax after using Ansible for awhile. Well, you can also use bash to accomplish tasks that do not have modules for.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are very little cons, but here are some cons that by design:
- Due to lack of centralized server, you cannot orchestrate automations that span multiple nodes asynchronously. You can still run a playbook against all nodes of the cluster, but if there are inter-dependencies, then all hosts must be included in the playbook and you have to implement some logic to resolve those dependencies. By contract, when using a centralized tool like Chef, you can fetch information from centralized data structures which can be populated asynchronously.
- Also due to simplicity, Ansible does not handle playbook versioning, it's something that you have to implement on your own.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Complex automations. It greatly allowed us to implement very complex automations in clean, reusable manner.


    Kalyan M.

Very easy to use

  • October 28, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
It is very easy to use. All you to do is write in a bunch of commands and give it an inventory file and the ansible will execute those commands on all the servers that are in the inventory file.
What do you dislike about the product?
Ansible is push based. It is not pull based like puppet. So we may not be able to have a fixed constant environment like we have with puppet. One may make changes on one server and we may not even know that.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Ability to do multiple tasks on multiple servers at the same time by writing a small script.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I strongly recommend using this.


    Frederic L.

Automation for SysAdmins

  • September 17, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is an amazing tool who allows to automating SysAdmin tasks like big deployment of the same instances or managing updates. All this : without physically accessing the machine and all is logged so it remains ISO 20K compliant !
What do you dislike about the product?
There is a learning curve and you need to understand Yaml to write playbooks. But actually, this is not too complex and the wiki website is well documented. The community is very big.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Deployment at scale of complex environment with audit logs.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Don't be afraid to learn new products, this one really really worth your time investment. It is free, open source and community drive OR you can buy subscription and get support from Red Hat directly. There is UI called Tower, but if you don't absolutely need it, avoid it.


    Sergio F.

Revolutionary manager for groups of servers

  • August 11, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
The simplicity of commands to manage a full complex group of servers. It's really easy to see where they are alive or not (via a ping play, for example). With playbooks, you automate the building. What I like the most is that you can use it along Docker, and even Vagrant. At our company, in the next software version we will deploy, we will be using Ansible due to its simplicity. We've already built some of the playbooks
What do you dislike about the product?
Really, the only thing I would like is Ansible Tower to be free. But well, not everything is possible!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are managing a group of servers that need to be deployed and updated. The software we are releasing has some modules that change, and we need them updated whenever the client calls or via planned updates. The thing is that when something is failing in a client, we find what's causing the problem, and then replicate in the rest of the servers. It's simply astonishing.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Do not fear, I am still facing superiors to change to Ansible because they are too only-bash-basic-commands and build-everything-on-bash.


    Erik W.

Easy to get going, advanced enough to do what you need to do

  • July 31, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is easy to get into, it has a simplistic configuration and allows for a huge variety of integrations with other services.
What do you dislike about the product?
The major downside is when you need something that is not officially supported. You'll get on galaxy and look for a 3rd party plugin. Some of those are great, but not all.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Previously we used webmin to manage our servers, it was a mess. These days we use Ansible as Configuration Management and are looking to expand its usage into builds and deployment.


    Garett D.

Great system automation

  • July 16, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is a great tool for managing servers, especially for tasks that would traditionally fall under the umbrella of system administration. The ability to manage servers without installing clients (it uses SSH) removes a huge barrier to entry and allows you to use it to manage a large number of devices.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is lots of documentation, but it lacks a good API, in the sense of having a set of documents that tell you how all the inner-workings operate. There are many examples, but it can be difficult to find a comprehensive list of all the different operations that Ansible uses, and how things work. This makes the inner-workings feel like a black box, and sometimes you have to resort to a try-this-and-see-what-happens approach to getting it to do what you want. Once you get it running, especially after you've used it more and "get" how it works, it can be pretty frustrating.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Managing large sets of servers in a programmatic way that is version-controlled, and easily managed both by people who are code-knowledgable and those who are not (Ansible uses yaml, which essentially looks like a todo list)
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Spend some time reading through documentation, and looking through other people's code (Github, et al) to get an understanding of how it works and what you can do with it (and how). This might make it easier to get up and running and to make sure you can do what you want with it.


    Hazzim A.

If your environment to manage is Linux, Ansible should be your election.

  • July 06, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ansible born in Linux to manage Linux so the features are designed to be smoothly and very easy to do, for a sysadmin understand how works and start using is very easy, and for developers is easy to manage infrastructure with limited knowledge or background.
What do you dislike about the product?
Support for windows environments are still limited, is better than previous versions but there is still a lot of work to do.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I'm using Ansible to automate cloud deploys for Openstack infrastructure, and for the continuous integration/continuous delivery process (We are using Zuul and is tied to Ansible)
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If your environment is only Linux or cloud based Ansible is your best option, if you have Windows servers you will need check if your needs can be covered by Ansible.

The initial setup is simple and learn to work with it is very simple for sysadmins and even for developers.

If you can architect your solution with Galaxy should be great, or with Ansible standalone should be enough for most environments.


    Dhanish M.

The best IT automation tool

  • July 05, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
The agentless architecture, making the remote host not requiring special configuration on the remote host
What do you dislike about the product?
Only Python API and bad at describing errors
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automating management of our infrastructure
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Go for it.


    Adam K.

Excellent devops tool

  • February 24, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is extremely flexible with dozens if not hundreds of modules, including powershell
What do you dislike about the product?
The learning curve is a little steep if you’ve never used a tool like this before, but it’s something you could pick up over a day or two
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Weekly and daily repetitive tasks that usually take several hours now take us about 5 minutes
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Take a good couple days to evaluate all the processes and scripts you run on a regular basis. Chances are they can all be setup in Ansible


    Information Technology and Services

Automation... Ansible makes it a breeze

  • January 27, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Easy to learn, fast to implement, no need to have various agents installed in your remote servers - a simple SSH connection can serve you, installation is a breeze - pip/apt/brew - any package manager of your choice, though Ansible itself is written in python, you don't need to learn python to use Ansible, uses human-friendly yaml syntax (eye-candy), easily integrates with most cloud infra providers, ever growing modules, easy management of tasks (modules), guarantees idempotency
What do you dislike about the product?
Ansible is not yet mature to accept python3
Ansible uses Jinja2 as a part of its templating system. Hence, not knowing the jinja DSL can hurt you back
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
deployment
orchestration
automation
configuration management
patch management
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Each of the tools have been created to solve a different type of business need. What Ansible had to offer us is different from what it has to offer other businesses. Hence, it is advisable to other users to first know the business problem they are trying to solve and assess how Ansible fits in that place.
Similarly, if you think you need to learn python to use Ansible, don't be discouraged, you don't need to. Well, it helps to extend modules if you do know python fundamentals.