As of today, companies with networked computing environments experience challenges with deploying and managing servers and services efficiently. System administrators need to manage servers manually and engage in activities such as installing software, modifying configurations, and administering services.
As business needs and data centers grow, systems become sophisticated, and admins face difficulties while scaling manual systems. At the same time, engineers face challenges with agile practices that involve continuous integration and deployment since IT operations require more time to configure systems.
Besides, it becomes riotous and labor-intensive in situations where an organization is administering a fleet of servers requiring constant updating, copying data, and pushing changes.
Improve productivity by automating complex multi-tier IT application environments.
Organizations can use configuration management tools to manage and provision data centers in real-time through plaintext definition files. The solution abstracts many of the operating-system-specific implementations of a configuration.
Businesses can leverage configuration management using Ansible to easily manage and schedule an IT environment that consists of multiple virtual private clouds (VPCs) and AWS accounts.
You can automate standard sysadmin tasks using Ansible, an open-source IT configuration management, deployment, and orchestration tool.
Some of the tasks that Ansible automates include:
Traditionally, network and system administrators manage servers manually, which involves tedious and labor-intensive activities such as installing software, modifying configurations, and administering services on each server.
Current businesses run complex applications hosted in big data centers. In such situations, it becomes challenging for system admins to scale the systems manually. Besides, the legacy approach to system management hampers frequent and agile software release.
Poor manual configurations can result in cybersecurity risks, including cyber-attacks and data breaches.
Businesses can simplify administration tasks with configuration management using tools like Ansible. The straightforward process involves creating a group of machines, describing the configuration requirements, and any other necessary actions. Configuration management using Ansible enables admins to automate issuing commands from a central location to perform the tasks.
The process eliminates the tedious tasks of installing client software on node machines/fleet of servers. Instead, the tool is installed in the control machine (even a laptop) where the admin can be running commands.
Organizations like NASA that have implemented Ansible in configuration management are better equipped to manage their AWS environments. The solution provides better operations, efficiency, and security to clients.
Configuration management using Ansible reduced the time for updating Nasa.gov from over 1 hour to under 5 minutes. The solution also reduced the patching update process from a multi-day task to 45 minutes, and provisioning OS accounts across the entire environment now happens in under 10 minutes. Ansible reduced the application stack set up from 1-2 hours to under 10 minutes per stack.
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