Advent One Explains Why Organisations Need Cloud Automation
The need for automation has always risen when a prominent process becomes too complex or time consuming. With the disruption happening in many industries and the impact of the global crisis, automation has never been as needed as it is now. From QA automation to business process automation and robotic process automation, the inclusion of automation has the chance to help a business stay ahead of the competition.
The Impact of Cloud services.
Cloud became the upgraded version of automation integration by provisioning organisations with the power to automate their resource consumption taking automation in IT to the next level. With Cloud, organisations are able to choose their desired resources, get automated updates, scale automatically with on-demand services, and experience effective management of these resources without a person involved.
Then with the growth of Cloud computing and its continuous advancement, the task of managing the Cloud infrastructure is becoming very complex. Sizing, load balancing, standardising deployments, configuring cloud services, establishing clusters, creating virtual networks, deploying the application on the Cloud, and then monitoring all this, is the challenge.
Cloud automation enables organisations to create, modify, tear down, and manage Cloud resources, automatically, managing tasks such as:
1. Infrastructure as Code
2. Workload management
3. Hybrid Cloud management
4. Version control.
Cloud Automation helps to reduce cost, enhance efficiency and ensure security. To really reap the benefits of Cloud automation, organisations need to incorporate orchestration and automation tools such as Ansible.
Advent One’s Ansible Capability
Ansible is not your typical Cloud automation tool, it provides much more.
From the daily tasks of a system administrator to DevOps teams and even the everyday users, Ansible is at the forefront of Cloud automation. Its primary focus is on automating the tasks of IT professionals such as application deployment, intra-service orchestration, updating servers, cloud provisioning, configuration management, and much more.
Ansible requires zero additional requirements for agent software or security infrastructure, which is why it is so easy to deploy. The desired state is defined in files that are written in yaml, an easy to read markup language. Ansible enables teams to bring to life the concept of “Infrastructure-as-code” with a core belief that maintenance of servers and modern infrastructure needs similar practises as that of the software development. By utilising version control to track changes and manage the configuration of the desired state, modern software development practises can be used for infrastructure as well as applications.
How it works to improve Cloud-based operations
Ansible has the concept of a control node, which centrally pushes automation to a fleet of managed nodes. All the nodes under management are contacted by the Ansible control node which sends an automated task defined in playbooks. Playbooks consist of plays which contain individual tasks or repeatable roles, which are instructions as to what automation is to be performed. Tasks consist of modules, of which there are thousands available, enabling simple interaction with devices, operating systems, cloud platforms and applications.
Ansible typically uses secure SSH communication to access to the nodes under management, but the availability of other forms of authentication also exist for devices and/or systems that do not support SSH. The instructions that the module applies are sent by Ansible and can be run in check mode or apply mode. For instance, if a particular software package is absent on a managed node, but the desired state Ansible enforces includes that software, Ansible will install that software on the managed node. Even if the version is different on different managed nodes, Ansible can automatically upgrade the version wherever required.
This is just a basic example of how Ansible can manage and automate tasks across several computers on a network through Ansible modules. These modules are configured through configuration files called “playbook”. The playbook is written in YAML and is in a human-readable format. Playbooks are self-documenting. For an already configured system, running a playbook will have no negative effect.
Summary
While Cloud automation seems an imperative integration in your organisation and a tool like Ansible makes it seem possible, the inclusion of such a tool and enabling Cloud automation is a highly complex operation.
Advent One’s managed services are what your organisation needs. Our extensive process and our comprehensive services backed by a rich experience allow us to provide extraordinary support.
Contact us here to discuss Advent One’s Cloud Automation services.