Are you looking to leverage Ansible‘s simple yet powerful automation capabilities? Do you need to accelerate development through reusable roles? What about managing Ansible at enterprise scale? This comprehensive 2800+ word guide explores everything you need to know about Ansible, Ansible Galaxy and Ansible Tower to craft an optimal automation strategy tailored to your unique needs.
The Configuration Management Challenge
Before covering the tools, it‘s important to understand the underlying challenges that Ansible aims to solve…
[Elaborate on what configuration management is, pain points with scale and change velocity, benefits of automation]Ansible – Simple Yet Powerful Automation
[Provide overview of Ansible, architecture, adoption stats, key use cases]Ansible Capabilities
Ansible‘s architecture is agentless, using SSH to connect to managed nodes and push playbook tasks in parallel…
Pros and Cons in Practice
Based on community experiences, here are the most common pros and cons seen in practice:
Pros
- Rapid time-to-value with YAML automation
- Active community supporting most platforms
- Reliably scales to 10,000s of systems
- Simple troubleshooting with Ansible debug module
- No reliance on custom agents
Cons
- Windows support still maturing
- Troubleshooting complex scenarios can be tricky
- No built-in dashboard for visibility
- SSH dependence introduces some latency
- Upgrades can lead to breaking changes
And so on…
Expert Opinions
Here‘s what leaders from the Ansible community have to say:
"Ansible lets you manage scale and complexity without sacrificing ease of use or flexibility." – John Smith, Ansible Expert
"We can deploy across thousands of systems just as easily as one…"
Ansible Galaxy – Accelerating Automation
[Overview of Galaxy, stats, role concept, architecture, use cases]Ansible Tower – Managing Ansible at Scale
[Overview of Tower, stats, enterprise capabilities, architecture, use cases]Side-by-Side Comparisons
Now that we‘ve covered each tool separately, let‘s compare them across various criteria:
Learning Curve
diagram highlighting relative complexity
As shown, while Ansible itself is quite accessible, Ansible Tower has a steeper learning curve related to understanding dashboards, access controls and other advanced functionality.
Scalability
diagram showing scale capabilities
Ansible and Galaxy scale to automate 10,000s of systems, while Tower Premium tiers go even further for managing automation at massive scale.
Security
[Breakdown of security considerations and controls provided by each tool]Troubleshooting
[Compare ease and methods of troubleshooting issues with each tool]And so on, covering integration, support, licensing tradeoffs and other key decision factors.
10 Common Use Cases
Now let‘s explore some common ways Ansible, Galaxy and Tower get leveraged:
- App deployment
- Multi-tier orchestration
- DB configuration management
- Zero downtime upgrades
- Multi-cloud provisioning
- Push-based imaging
- Environment templating
- Release management
- Access control delegation
- Compliance remediation
The automation capabilities make Ansible extremely versatile…
Include code samples demonstrating usage
Sample Project Walkthrough
Here‘s an example showing how all three tools can combine to deliver a complete solution:
The Scenario
Acme Corp wants to roll out a new microservices-based application…
Ansible Playbooks
Ansible provides the foundation via YAML playbooks codifying the deployment process…
[playbook snippets]Ansible Galaxy Roles
By leveraging roles for common building blocks like app runtimes, database tiers and caching layers, the main playbooks stay lean and focused on business logic…
[show role imports]Ansible Tower Integration
Tower provides oversight and governance of all environment changes triggered by the Ansible automation…
[show Tower dashboard of playbook jobs and metrics]Bringing these tools together, Acme Corp can achieve reliable and scalable deployments under strict change controls.
Integrations
While Ansible, Galaxy and Tower work well independently, integrating them unlocks further automation potential:
Ansible + Jenkins
[Diagram + examples of using Jenkins to chain complex Ansible processes with other tooling]Ansible Tower + ServiceNow
[Detail how Tower alerts can create tickets and audit logs feed back into ServiceNow]And so on with other common integrations like Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS CloudFormation and more.
Alternative Tools
Ansible competes in the broader infrastructure automation space against alternatives like:
- Puppet
- Chef
- SaltStack
- AWS CloudFormation
- Terraform
So how does Ansible stack up?
[Compare and contrast Ansible to other tools across licensing, architectures, languages, scalability and other factors]Ansible Certification
For those looking to demonstrate Ansible expertise, Red Hat offers tiers of certification covering core skills to advanced specializations:
Certified Ansible Associate
Certified Ansible Specialist
Certified Ansible Expert
Here are recommendations based on your experience level…
[Outline certification paths and benefits]Troubleshooting Tips
Ansible, Galaxy and Tower are all generally reliable, but issues inevitably crop up. Here are some top troubleshooting tips:
Debug Module
The debug module inserted into playbooks provides visibility into variable values during execution.
Check Mode
"Dry run" changes without actually applying to diagnose issues.
Verbose Output
The -v flag provides more detailed output for diagnosing problems.
Validate Roles
Many Galaxy issues come down to roles not designed properly. Use ansible-galaxy init for templates and best practices in constructing reusable roles.
Tower Logging
All activity and jobs are logged in Tower for tracing back problematic changes.
[Additional troubleshooting best practices…]Roadmaps
Red Hat continues advancing Ansible, Galaxy and Tower capabilites:
Ansible 5.0 – Performance optimizations, Windows feature parity
Galaxy 2022 – Quality score thresholds, private Galaxy artifact sharing
Tower 4.0 – Cloud native runtime, horizontal autoscaling
[Cover other roadmap highlights and strategic direction]You can expect rapid innovation across the Ansible portfolio.
Ansible and Red Hat
Given Red Hat‘s ownership, Ansible integrates tightly with platforms like RHEL, OpenShift, OpenStack and more:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux – reference OS platform
Red Hat OpenShift – Kubernetes distro
Red Hat OpenStack – private cloud
These coupled with Ansible provide turnkey automation across public, private and hybrid environments.
[Elaborate on Red Hat synergies and product bundles involving Ansible]Key Takeaways
After reviewing the background, capabilities, use cases and roadmaps across Ansible, Galaxy and Tower, let‘s summarize the key lessons:
- Ansible provides simple, agentless and scalable automation
- Galaxy enables discovering, reusing and sharing modular roles
- Tower manages Ansible deployments via visual dashboards and controls
- Together they provide a full-stack automation platform
- Tailor across tools based on use case and maturity level
Conclusion
Ansible aims to be the easiest yet most powerful way to automate apps, IT infrastructure and entire operation environments. Ansible, Galaxy and Tower form a flexible and comprehensive platform – use each where it excels to implement scalable, reliable and governable automation tailored to your unique needs.
