What are advantages offered by deploying agents via Ansible ?

[rswarnka]

An enterprise has around 50+ different applications on various architecture running mostly on-premise (of varied configurations).

May I know significant advantages of having ansible/ansible tower for one agent deployment and maintenance over long period?

AFAIK, automation is not useful for design once and runs very few times kind of problems. Do let me know about advantages.

[skrystosik · Accepted solution]

In general automatisation is rather process improvement than monitoring quality. We have clients that are destroying environments and building them from scratch after each deployment, so automatisation is important there. Ansible will make you sure in general that even after staff replacement, agent will always be present (for example when somebody don't know that it should be installed as well on new host attached to your architecture). You can as well use Ansible to deal with DT configuration using configuration API. You can as well use Events API to send information about deployed version to affected entities, you can start maintenance windows during deployment to avoid alerting etc. So in general there is much space for using it (not only for deployment itself).

Sebastian

[rswarnka]

Pretty agree only the immediate advantage Ansible can foster DevOps culture in traditional waterfall/ITSM.

However, I am specifically skeptical about the immediate ROI (on automation Dev+Maintenance) offered by such integrations within mostly-on-prem and traditional ops (ITSM).

What you think?

[skrystosik]

We have Client (huge bank) which is now migrating everything to code driven operations even on prem. in general it’s good idea in my opinion but everything depends of organisation. If you have general trend, or you want to start this, I feather prefer to have everything integrated. Dynatrace as well. We are using Xebia as orchestrator on our client environments (easy to deploy and maintain). Looks at this product 🙂 Ansible code in large environment can be nightmare.

Sebastian

[rswarnka]

That will be a good start Sebastian ! Thank you !

[larry_roberts]

Great question. We are still debating the entire Ansible VS Puppet topic within our organization. We currently use Puppet for everything.