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Powerful automation as code tool
What do you like best about the product?
Versatility to design your environment and configure exactly to the specifications of your application
What do you dislike about the product?
Slight learning curve, but easy to follow afterwards
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automating application deployments for server farms
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Try it out and compare with other DevOps tools
- Mark review as helpful
Ansible is an easy to learn, extensible and has a module for everything
What do you like best about the product?
There is a plenty of configuration management tools that helps you automate tasks and gain in productivity. Each one has its own specific way for configuration management, with many different pros and cons.
Among these tools Ansible stand a part as an automation tool that works very well while very easily to get started with. It's killer feature is that you don't need a specific infrastructure setup, no need to deploy agents all over to get an Ansible script working. In addition, Ansible is very extensible and has a plethora of modules that you can use to deploy any software stack (ruby on rails, django, etc.) as well as provisioning infrastructure resources from many providers whether it is cloud (e.g. Amazon cloud) or on premise (e.g. openstack, vargant).
Among these tools Ansible stand a part as an automation tool that works very well while very easily to get started with. It's killer feature is that you don't need a specific infrastructure setup, no need to deploy agents all over to get an Ansible script working. In addition, Ansible is very extensible and has a plethora of modules that you can use to deploy any software stack (ruby on rails, django, etc.) as well as provisioning infrastructure resources from many providers whether it is cloud (e.g. Amazon cloud) or on premise (e.g. openstack, vargant).
What do you dislike about the product?
Ansible is no more independent as it was purchased by RedHat in order to make it more Enterprise friendly. Furthermore, this change may impact the choice what modules will be maintained by the core team. For instance, it more likely that the Openstack module will be more prioritised than the vagrant module or AWS module.
Also, Ansible is mostly a CLI tool with no advanced support for a graphical interface (which is the case of most of the other configuration management tools), though it has the Ansible Tower but it is an enterprise product.
Also, Ansible is mostly a CLI tool with no advanced support for a graphical interface (which is the case of most of the other configuration management tools), though it has the Ansible Tower but it is an enterprise product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I started looking for automation systems since I wrote my first bash scripts because writing bash scripts is hard and maintaining them is even harder. Furthermore, I'm not a system administrator but rather a developer and I hate to do the same thing twice. I believe (and you should too) in DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself).
Tools like Ansible are powerful as they gave a boost in productivity when it comes to handle many machines and applications with a lot of moving parts.
Tools like Ansible are powerful as they gave a boost in productivity when it comes to handle many machines and applications with a lot of moving parts.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you have to manage a large number of servers hosting a much larger number of applications, then you must start looking for an automation tool. In this case Ansible is the choice to consider, it is the easiest tool out there to learn and has many modules and writing own modules if needed is not hard (python scripts).
Good for Configuration Management
What do you like best about the product?
Ansible provides a simple way to perform distributed server management, and it's quite easy to maintain configuration for a group of servers. Overall, my favorite portions are the simplicity and efficiency, especially that it does not require a dedicated server to act as the host for configuration.
What do you dislike about the product?
I've only used it for a few servers, and I'm not entirely sure how it would perform in larger-scale implementations, with hundreds or thousands of servers with widely varying roles.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Configuration of multiple servers and keeping all configuration inside a git repo. The fact that it allows me to easily and quickly set up new servers is extremely valuable, as well.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Gather requirements beforehand.
Continuous Delivery with Ansible, Jenkins and Docker
What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is really easy to use. Its default plugins covers most of the core needs that a DevOps could use. Unlike Chef, you don't need any client on the nodes you want to manage as everything is done through SSH. This reduction in complexity helps a lot in plugin development, bug fixing and debugging.
What do you dislike about the product?
Most of the times documentation is nice or enough but, sometimes, it's a bit tricky to understand some of the characteristics or commands of some plugins, sometimes because you need deep understanding of the things you're going to do, sometimes because description isn't perfect. You'll manage to do everything at the end.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Deployment of dozens of nodes at the same time. Our benefits are the development and testing of our playbooks, that are lot easier that with Chef (our previous solution) without the deployment of the Chef Server + an Chef Agent on each machine in our cluster.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you are starting in DevOps world, start with Ansible. If you have spend some time in DevOps world or you're already an expert that haven't used it yet, give it a try, I'm sure that most of the users will enjoy its simplicity and ease of use.
Effortless server configuration
What do you like best about the product?
I love that there is no agent to install on each server that you want to manage. Everything is done over SSH. I started writing playbooks and doing the same actions on multiple servers in minutes.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes, the documentation is a little vague. More concrete examples would be very helpful for new users. Luckily, there are some good guides online from other sources.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I manage ~400 servers and I needed a way to easily spin up a new VPS and install our application on it. What used to take about an hour now takes about a minute. I also use Ansible for continuous deployment. Application updates are scripted with Ansible and can be on each server almost instantly. Ansible also allowed us to keep a consistent server configuration across our business.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Read the documentation. Almost everything is covered very well, but because it is so flexible they can't put every situation in the documentation. Search online for how others user Ansible in their environments. Search GitHub for playbooks.
Ansible revirew
What do you like best about the product?
Simplicity and relatively low learning curve
What do you dislike about the product?
Extensibility with custom functionality if you need something that is not present OOTB
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Automation of deployment processes
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It's good tool for deployment automation with low learning curve and simple in usage
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