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Great system automation
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.
Configuration Management - Ansible
What do you like best about the product?
Easy to use and very efficient way to work in a team. Bring lots of productivity with this tool.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing to dislike, but as the new technology evolves, this tool needs to be upgraded.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Telecommunications. Configuration management is the benefit I have realized.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Configuration Management
Great for configuring Mesos cluster nodes
What do you like best about the product?
- no agent required, as long as you can establish SSH - it works
- flexibility to run with a dedicated server or with workstations
- allows separation of leader and agent tasks into separate .yaml files that can be called using conditional checks in the main.yaml (control file)
- very readable and powerful template engine
- flexibility to run with a dedicated server or with workstations
- allows separation of leader and agent tasks into separate .yaml files that can be called using conditional checks in the main.yaml (control file)
- very readable and powerful template engine
What do you dislike about the product?
- DNS lookup facility has a python library dependency
- the DSL to use dig lookup to do a reverse lookup is not very readable; it's more readable and reliable to local-exec dig
- need to maintain an inventory of your machines
- the DSL to use dig lookup to do a reverse lookup is not very readable; it's more readable and reliable to local-exec dig
- need to maintain an inventory of your machines
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have been able to automate the configuration of our Mesos cluster nodes. Prior to this, configuring Mesos nodes was very manual and error-prone. Now we can provision the nodes with Terraform and configure them in a few minutes rather than going through hours of configuration.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Ansible works really well for cattle-type deploys meaning when you need automation/configuration management to build up infrastructure that will be torn down and rebuilt when updating. If you intend on your CF to converge your configs, probably Chef or Puppet works better. In our use case when we upgrade or run into problems, it's quicker for us to destroy the instances in question and reprovision/reconfigure. For this use-case, Ansible works really well.
Simplest configuration management tool available out there
What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is an open source solution that makes configuring infrastructures an easy task for sysadmins. In the contrary to other configuration management tools, Ansible is very simple to get started with and it lowers the entry barrier to automation, all you need to write playbooks is a text editor. One of the powerful features of Ansible is that it is agent-less, which means there is no need to install any software on remote systems (especially your client's systems) in order to automate a task (installing a software stack) on these machines. Also, Ansible relies on the SSH protocol while other automation tools use their own protocols that may need special firewall ports to be opened. Furthermore, Ansible can be easily used with tools like Vagrant to automate the provisioning of development environments on local machine.
What do you dislike about the product?
The main drawback is the absence of an open source graphical interface for Ansible that make it easy to monitor the entire inventory. Ansible only provide an command line utility and the only GUI solution available seems to be Ansible Tower which is an enterprise solution. Ansible was recently bought by RedHat so this may raise questions on the direction the project will take in future.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We switched from Chef into Ansible to exclusively automating the provisioning of platforms on AWS (and other Cloud providers) and configuring application stacks for our clients. The stack range from RoR (Ruby on Rails) to Django web applications; to database management and clustering. The switching wasn't very painful, and Ansible helped us quickly writing new automation tasks. Furthermore, we gained a lot from the ability to use Vagrant along with Ansible in order to replicate production environment into the developer's machines and having a huge boost in terms of productivity, detecting bugs and fixing them quickly.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Ansible has excellent performance, it has no need for installing any agents on remote systems. it's based on python which is a well known language for scripting especially among the sysadmin community. Ansible is the way to go if these properties fit in your day-to-day requirements.
Linux Automation
What do you like best about the product?
I love, that Ansible is Python based and provide very flexible way to configure any part of host configuration and it is free. I've widely used Ansible to deploy and configure various application in Linux. The great benefit, that Ansible does not require any agent and use ssh (you have to sort SSL related query on PRD). One more great advantage is that playbooks has defined structure and there are tons of addons in galaxy source.
What do you dislike about the product?
As Ansible is Python based, it is very much sensitive to code. So you should have exact number of spaces in each line or Ansible will fail.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Environment deployment Automation, preparing different changes on installed software, using templates for configures.
With Ansible we can follow Configuration as a Code conception and made our changes more predictable and easy to verify.
With Ansible we can follow Configuration as a Code conception and made our changes more predictable and easy to verify.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
test playbooks prior execution on using available feature
Automate orchestration, deployment, configuration and more as a code
What do you like best about the product?
Ansible helps treat Infrastructure as code. Easy to setup, Ansible does not require agents to be installed, relies on SSH. This makes it easier to be used for a variety of hosts in a dynamic environment. In case of agents, their versions and configuration also needs to be managed.
Playbooks are human readable (YAML format). They can easily be version controlled and thus ease collaboration and usage by other teams.
Although written in Python, modules can be added in many other languages.
Good community and ecosystem
Playbooks are human readable (YAML format). They can easily be version controlled and thus ease collaboration and usage by other teams.
Although written in Python, modules can be added in many other languages.
Good community and ecosystem
What do you dislike about the product?
It is slower than other options. The downside of using ssh is that you have to debug and resolve SSH issues yourself. From adding/updating keys, resolving conflicts to configuring sshd. Any errors arising from this needs to be taken care. Also you need to take care of outdated OSes with older Python versions.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Ansible is great for orchestration, deployment and managing in enterprise environments.
Playbooks
Playbooks
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Design for your environment, decide on Roles early on. Spend time to ensure Playbooks remain modular.
Best tool to seamlessly manage everything in a Data center.
What do you like best about the product?
The best thing is that its a one stop solution to all of our needs to manage an entire data center. We can manage configurations, deploy applications and it lets multiple people to work together rather than the traditional one sysadmin to manage it all, which is also possible from the Ansible command line.
The other thing is that its open source, which lets me add feature which other can use too. The community is very active too.
The other thing is that its open source, which lets me add feature which other can use too. The community is very active too.
What do you dislike about the product?
There are some features which i would like to be implemented one of which is supporting Kubernetes by Google and rkt from CoreOS but I am sure that its certainly on their roadmap and they will be adding those in the near future.
Other than that I don't think there is anything which I don't like in particular. It has really reduced overhead of managing using different tools, writing scripts and managing configurations.
Other than that I don't think there is anything which I don't like in particular. It has really reduced overhead of managing using different tools, writing scripts and managing configurations.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are managing a data center in a university which handles application deployment for research purposes.
Ansible is the only solution we need to do all of that, otherwise we had to use atleast a dozen of other softwares and it even would have been impossible. We don't need to write scripts anymore.
We are using SDN (Software Defined Networks) to automate network configurations on HP SDN enabled switches
Ansible is the only solution we need to do all of that, otherwise we had to use atleast a dozen of other softwares and it even would have been impossible. We don't need to write scripts anymore.
We are using SDN (Software Defined Networks) to automate network configurations on HP SDN enabled switches
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
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.
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