Volume 2, Issue 1, No.4 PDF DOWNLOAD
  • Title:
  • Ansible: A Reliable Tool for Automation
  • Author:

    Mohammed Daffalla Elradi

  • Author Affiliation:

    Communication Systems Engineering Department, University of Science and Technology, Khartoum, Sudan

  • Received:Jun.22, 2023
  • Accepted:Jul.18, 2023
  • Published:Aug.1, 2023
Abstract
Technologies have advanced drastically throughout the last decade, where IT professionals are challenged with the task to install, configure, manage and troubleshoot a considerable amount of IT infrastructure. The challenge is to keep your IT environment consistent and up to date. Here, automation hops into the scene, as it plays a pivotal role in daily activities of modern IT. Automation provides an approach to streamline multiple processes across different platforms to guarantee an efficient, scalable, collaborative and cost-effective infrastructure management. There are many automation tools that are used nowadays, each has its pros and cons. In this paper Ansible was used to provide a complete web app due to the fact that it is agentless, which is more flexible in terms of compatibility and requires no installation on managed nodes and other distinct features. It was found to be a reliable tool in tasks automation, as it reduced the time required to obtain the final outcome by 70%, which is approximately 5.6 times less than when no automation was used. 
Keywords

Automation, agentless, ansible, yaml, playbook.

References

[1] Ahmad N. et al. (2020) Cloud Computing Trends and Cloud Migration Tuple. In: Saini H.S., Singh R.K., Tariq Beg M., Sahambi J.S. (eds) Innovations in Electronics and Communication Engineering (2020): 737-745. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 107. Springer, Singapore

[2] Knight, Simon; Rienties, Bart; Littleton, Karen; Tempelaar, Dirk; Mitsui, Matthew and Shirag, Chirag (2017). The Orchestration of a Collaborative Information Seeking Learning Task. Information Retrieval Journal, 20(5) pp.480–505.

[3] Automation vs. Orchestration: Which One to Choose in 2023? https://research.aimultiple.com/orchestration-vs-automation/. Accessed 6 Apr. 2023.

[4] McKinsey Global Institute. (2017a). “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment and Productivity”.

[5] Praveen Kumar Kollu, Kailash Kumar, Pravin R. Kshirsagar, Saiful Islam, Quadri Noorulhasan Naveed, Mohammad Rashid Hussain, Venkatesa Prabhu Sundramurthy, "Development of Advanced Artificial Intelligence and IoT Automation in the Crisis of COVID-19 Detection", Journal of Healthcare Engineering, vol. 2022, Article ID 1987917, 12 pages, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/1987917.

[6] Weidong Gai, Yue Gu, Jiaming Qin, "Financial Automation Audit Method Based on Blockchain Technology", Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, vol. 2022, Article ID 9941585, 12 pages, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/9941585.

[7] Pillai, U. (2022). Automation, productivity, and innovation in information technology. Macroeconomic Dynamics, 1-27. doi:10.1017/S1365100521000699.

[8] Wurster, M., Breitenbücher, U., Brogi, A., Diez, F., Leymann, F., Soldani, J. and Wild, K., 2021. Automating the Deployment of Distributed Applications by Combining Multiple Deployment Technologies. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science.

[9] Hintsch, J., Görling, C., & Turowski, K. (2016). A Review of the Literature on Configuration Management Tools. International Conference on Information Resources Management.

[10] Zeng, S., Adam, C., Wu, F., Guo, S., Ruan, Y., Venugopal, C., & Puri, R. (2014, May). Managing risk in multi-node automation of endpoint management. 2014 IEEE Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS).

[11] Overview of Puppet’s Architecture. https://www.puppet.com/docs/puppet/5.5/architecture.html. Accessed 4 Apr. 2023.

[12] Chef Infra Overview. https://docs.chef.io/chef_overview/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2023.

[13] Salt System Architecture. https://docs.saltproject.io/en/3004/topics/salt_system_architecture.html. Accessed 4 Apr. 2023.

[14] Howard, Michael. Terraform -- Automating Infrastructure as a Service. 2022. DOI.org (Datacite), https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2205.10676.

[15] Ansible Architecture — Ansible Documentation. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/dev_guide/overview_architecture.html. Accessed 4 Apr. 2023.

[16] Ramandeep Singh, Dr. Ravindra Kumar Purwar, 2019, Cloud Automation with Configuration Managementusing CHEF Tool, INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGINEERING RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY (IJERT) Volume 08, Issue 04 (April –2019).

[17] Kodali, Sailesh, "Automation of Production Servers using DevOps (Puppet) Tools" (2016). Culminating Projects in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. 64.

[18] Kumaran, N., et al. “Chef Automation on Google Cloud.” International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, vol. 10, no. 3, Mar. 2022, pp. 1491–98. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2022.40909.

[19] Howard, Michael. Terraform -- Automating Infrastructure as a Service. 2022. DOI.org (Datacite), https://doi.org/10.48550/ARXIV.2205.10676.

[20] S, Likitha. “Automation of Server Configuration Using Ansible.” International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology, vol. 10, no. 6, June 2022, pp. 4109–13. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2022.44840.

[21] Kaushik, S., & Gupta, S. (2017). Implementation of Open Stack Through Ansible. International Journal of Engineering and Advanced Technology (IJEAT).

Copyright 2018 - 2023 Sanderman Publishing House