Our use cases are related to system compliance, package management, system patching, and general infrastructure and security as a code.
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Automating our way to standards and real time resolution
What do you like best about the product?
We can use command line and well as the interface.
What do you dislike about the product?
Dependance on client software to be at certain levels. A common issue with most applications.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Standardized operating and application configuration
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Automation Made Easy
What do you like best about the product?
How easy my team can complete tasks that normally take days or weeks.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing at this momement as we just started to use the product.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Resolving human errors that occur with repetative tasks.
Automation is Key and AAP give us a fast way to build new things
What do you like best about the product?
It is easy to start with and it helps to increase colaboration across different teams
What do you dislike about the product?
On large scale you can run in some challenges and performance problems. to scale up a downtime is needed
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
AAP helps us to reduce deployment time for new servers from days down to minutes
Ansible with the Breeze
What do you like best about the product?
configuration and automation possibilities is endless
What do you dislike about the product?
sometimes controller roles configuration
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
it`s solving most of the automation and configuration problems also rutine task for OS managementand and orchestration
Easy-to-read YAML syntax, good interoperability, and high scalability
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We can easily remediate a lot of the routine tasks or even break-fix issues that keep coming up. It could be a simple break for which we do not have a root cause analysis for a proper solution, but it keeps coming up. We can easily remediate such issues and have those not impact workflows for our developers while we work on a full solution in the backend. It also helps with the general tasks of maintaining systems or correcting them when things get out of line. We are able to deploy things at scale versus having someone there. Their time is much more valuable. They do not have to spend five or ten minutes here or there throughout the day when they can be focused on a more dedicated effort elsewhere.
It helps us achieve our mission because we want to enable our researchers and developers to have an ecosystem that allows them to do what they need but in a secure environment. We want to protect system information, data, and IPs. We want to be able to do that at scale, quickly roll out changes, and maintain systems as needed for compliance. We want to allow all that holistically for our groups to manage. It has helped us with workflows to help expedite that process.
We also use other Red Hat products. We use Satellite and IDM, and we are moving towards AAP and EDA. We chose these products to help manage our infrastructure. Because we are managing Linux systems, we want everything to work and play with each other as well as they can. We are adopting the same ecosystem. Choosing Red Hat products allows us to do that with the most reliability, and we also get support from the experts who built the programs themselves. If anything were to go wrong, we have that backup of people who are dedicated to helping us find the solution for it. With multiple Red Hat products, we have interoperability. We are able to spread across different teams. If we standardize our process on the same products and the same technologies, it means we can train other departments and other groups to manage their own piece of the pie. If they have many different products, the only people who would know how to work with a product are the ones who are dedicated to working with that product, whereas if we standardize on the same kind of ecosystem, it is easier to cross-train on that.
It does a good job because the whole syntax is human-readable, and it is YAML. While it has its quirks, it is pretty straightforward. Generating playbooks, tasks, modules, and other things is pretty easy. Even the plugins are Python-based, so it is an easy language and it is near readable for Python, whereas, trying to make scripts for something or code in different languages is very tedious. You need people who are experts in making that deployable and handling any unexpected outcomes or different conditions that may cause issues, so having something that is easy and straightforward to learn and that handles all of the guesswork on the backend makes it much easier to develop automation.
It helps reduce the training required to learn how to automate things. It is a very easy language to learn, and it is not like learning an entire programming language.
It helps connect teams, such as developers, operations, or security so that they can automate together. Developers and operations definitely work hand in hand. Introducing infrastructure as a code or security as a code when they have not adopted that mindset can be difficult. They definitely agree with the concept but getting them to work and manage their own playbooks is a little bit more difficult because not everyone is intrinsically interested in coding even if it is a simple language. However, being able to have the partnership to say that we can help them out and they have a readable syntax is helpful. They can clearly see what is going on. It helps them a lot in understanding what is going on in the backend. We are becoming more and more productive as we get more products involved and more people on board with developing and adopting their own respective departments as code, such as infrastructure, security, IT, and anything else that we may have in the pipeline.
Its collection of certified content helps out a lot. We are able to pull certified content and then use it within whatever we are trying to deploy. Everything essentially works with whatever we are trying to deploy. If it does not work, we know that it is something on our end. It helps out with identifying known goods and then working from there.
It helps to reduce the time we spend on low-value or repetitive tasks. It has taken off about 45% of my workload from tedious tasks.
What is most valuable?
The easy-to-read syntax for YAML files and the interoperability between modules are valuable. There is also the ability to develop your own plug-ins and modules to be able to contribute. The scalability of Ansible across different environments is also valuable.
What needs improvement?
There are some integration issues with other technologies such as Satellite. It could be a Satellite issue and not an Ansible issue. There are bugs related to failed tasks not being failed and then reverting back to completed tasks. It might not be because of Ansible. It could be because of Satellite.
There have been some differences between the operating systems that we have noticed. It could be down to cryptographic policies, but we have noticed some speed issues. They should work on the speed of deployment on different operating systems.
They have already managed the other issue of introducing execution environments to make sure everything is the same with every system.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using this solution for about two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has been pretty reliable. The only issues that have come up are because of people asking it to do things that it is not built to do. All our issues tend to be someone on our end doing something that they probably should not be doing. If you are using it as it is intended, it is pretty reliable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. We have plans to increase its usage. We are planning to implement AAP, EDA, etc.
How are customer service and support?
The support has been nice whenever we had to put in any Red Hat-related issues. They are fairly responsive.
If there are issues that exceed their knowledge base, they usually escalate it to someone else who can handle them. We usually get a working solution fairly quickly with an actual root cause diagnosis.
I would rate them a ten out of ten. They have always been pretty speedy and reliable.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use Puppet. It is not the same. It is agent-based, and I am not a fan of it. Ansible is much more lightweight, robust, and flexible, so our other alternative used to be Puppet, but we are now onboard with Ansible.
In terms of ease of use, Ansible is a lot easier to read and develop with. Red Hat has certified content. They have their own supported modules, and the community also updates the modules that are community-maintained, whereas Puppet does not have the same kind of development. You are waiting for things to be updated from Puppet's end, which does not quite work with our use case. If there is a critical need for the update of a certain module to work with our environment, it does not really work because we need things to be updated semi-frequently or at least be maintained. Ansible helps take care of that. With Ansible, we can work with push or pull configurations depending on what we want to set up instead of having one configuration that Puppet works with, so it gives us flexibility.
Ansible is cheaper than Puppet, but we are scaling out and flushing out more infrastructure. So, because of how we use it, it does associate more costs. We use different kinds of licensing and products, but it is worth the costs and investments, whereas Puppet is its own ecosystem. It does its own thing, and that is it. It does not scale out to do the kind of things that we want to do.
How was the initial setup?
We manage from a central location and push out to our remote sites. Everything is on-prem.
It was simple from the Ansible's end. The complicated thing was getting the other tools and architecture needed to push out to where we wanted and getting all that developed, but the initial push out with Ansible was pretty simple and straightforward.
Our deployment strategy was to get it running and push it out to showcase the proof of concept of how much time we spend doing this and how much time we can save now because it can handle that automatically. The game plan was not a true holistic view of what we could do moving forward because we could not do that until we got more buy-in from everyone else to show how this positively impacts the organization.
What about the implementation team?
We did it on our own. We got the licensing and bought the tools. It was pretty much on us to figure it out.
What was our ROI?
The scalability of it is the biggest return on investment because it can scale to a small handful or thousands. It works for simple and complex scenarios. It can all be done without a lot of backend research. Obviously, with more complexity, you need people who know a bit more, but it is pretty easy to get up to speed. It is pretty flexible in terms of how it can scale to different environments.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Everything is generally fair. No one ever likes to pay a lot of money, but we are getting the value. We also get support with it. It has been fair and worthwhile.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate any other solution. It was pretty much trying to buy more into Puppet, but as we determined needs, we scaled it out to Ansible because we work in an environment with Red Hat. We also have other operational needs for which it works.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate it a ten out of ten because I enjoy it a lot.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Ansible is not only a great product but has helped to change the culture at our org
What do you like best about the product?
I like the fact that ansible uses Yaml which is plain test language, it makes it easier to teach new people joining our team, i also like that it is vendor agnostic so we only need one automation platform for our entire fleet
What do you dislike about the product?
I think the only thing i dont like about AAP is that there is no select all and disable or enable servers in an inventory. This means that i have to manually disable or enable each server
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Consistancy: Because of ansible our network functions are now very consistant which avoids outages.
AAP is a game changer
What do you like best about the product?
AAP is packed with amazing features. Being able to intelligently automate workloads at scale has tremendously impacted our efficiency. New advances with Event Driven Ansible are super exciting going forward
What do you dislike about the product?
It would be nice to have one unified interface for the controller and hub, but that's a minor gripe
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
User provisioning, server and application automation, and potentially OCP integration
Simplicity and robust
What do you like best about the product?
Storing the passwords securely that meets standards in Financial sector.
What do you dislike about the product?
The upgrade process is not that smooth currently.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were able to integrate with Service-now, Network devices and Microsoft teams which to solve the our Remediation porocess.
An excellent front end for Ansible empowerment
What do you like best about the product?
I think the best aspects of AAP are the ability to provide our teams with a nice, clean front end. Surveys are a very attractive feature to empower even non-technical users to leverage automation.
What do you dislike about the product?
I haven't found anything specific that I to identify as a drawback.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
AAP has given us a central interface with RBACs allowing us implement automation more broadly and lower the barrier to entry for our non-systems folks. It has made it easier for our network teams to get comfortable in the ansible space and reduced the number of ansible silos running in isolated environments.
Leading the automation journey
What do you like best about the product?
A very structured UI to manage AAP and the automation workflows
What do you dislike about the product?
We are in early stages of rolling out Ansible; having a clear idea of architecture complexities would help
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Infrastructure Automation
- Configuration management
- Integration with SNOW, Dynatrace
- Configuration management
- Integration with SNOW, Dynatrace
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