Red Hat Ansible and OpenShift are used by organizations worldwide as one of the top solutions for DevOps automation at scale. If your enterprise is managing thousands of endpoints or dealing with increasingly larger workloads, then there is a case to be made to implement Ansible with OpenShift as a solution that scales with your project workloads.
Here’s an overview of how Ansible and OpenShift can work together.
The Role of Ansible
RedHat Ansible is a configuration management tool available in open-source and enterprise versions. Using automated playbooks, DevOps teams can script out the configuration and setup of hardware and software under their responsibility.
Any enterprise seeking an automation solution for their infrastructure or application deployments is an ideal user for Ansible. It’s one of the most popular open-source software solutions on the market right now, and a de facto solution for standardized configuration management. Such popularity brings with it an active open-source community of contributors who are developing free modules and collections – integrations to third-party products such as networking, storage, and SaaS platforms. Ansible has thousands of modules, collections, and roles available for free via Ansible Galaxy.
The open-source and enterprise versions of Ansible are easy to use. Developers and engineers can write Ansible playbooks using YAML, a simple markup language that doesn’t require any formal programming background. The primary use cases for Ansible are infrastructure automation for on-premise and cloud systems, and configuration management. Ansible provides Platform and Operations teams a common and standardized tool to be used across different workload types.
The Value of Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift helps with the orchestration of containerized workloads. And these container workloads can be application services, databases, and other technology platform components.
Red Hat OpenShift is easy to set up and configure. The installation process leverages bootstrap mechanism to create installer-provisioned infrastructure. You can also use user-provisioned infrastructure to accommodate any customizations during install time. Additionally, you can use Ansible Playbooks and Roles to configure OpenShift, removing the need for human intervention.
Ansible and OpenShift play together throughout the workload deployment lifecycle. DevOps teams can use OpenShift’s console to manage and maintain their containerized workloads. Ansible automation plays an important part for configuration updates and helping integrate with CI/CD pipelines when releasing the application to lower and production environments. Automated security scanning validates the security of code throughout the development cycle. Ansible also provides an easy way to access third-party integrations such as SonarQube, a code checking engine, plus a range of other open-source and proprietary tools enabling you to test application workloads in a lower environment before deployment with OpenShift to a production environment.
Centralizing Infrastructure Automation at Scale
Most organizations benefit from using centralized infrastructure for OpenShift and Ansible. This way, they can scale across multiple teams, while allowing members from various teams to contribute towards these platforms, and towards automation goals at large. This also helps manage licensing costs by avoiding duplication targets, and most importantly, makes operational sense.
Now consider a scenario where an enterprise uses Puppet, Chef, or another open-source automation tool with or without Ansible. Their DevOps teams may have yet to set a standard automation tool leaving them dependent on an employee’s knowledge. Keyva has worked with several customers in this very situation, especially organizations that have aggressive acquisition strategies. By conducting several lunch-and-learn sessions, as well technical and business level briefings, we’ve helped organizations with tools consolidation as well as a charted path to reducing technical debt and risks associated with tools proliferation. We’ve also done client-specific assessments that analyze multiple automation platforms to determine the best fit for a client’s specific business and technology use cases.
Ansible and OpenShift: Better Together
Ansible, in conjunction with OpenShift, drives Infrastructure automation and operational excellence which goes hand in hand to work through the toughest of DevOps use cases. Keyva has extensive experience using a vendor-agnostic approach to building complete pipelines to meet a customer’s particular use case. We have experience working with Azure DevOps, GitHub, Jenkins, and many other pipeline tools from several past projects. Our approach is flexible and consultative. We don’t prescribe a one-size-fits-all framework to our customers who may be looking for solutions customized for their organization. The breadth of experience of our consulting team enables us to work on specific client needs, in whatever roles the client requires, within our skills portfolio.
Bringing together Ansible and OpenShift into an existing or new DevOps pipeline has the potential to move any enterprise to the next level of automation maturity. Ansible brings human operational knowledge in the form of playbooks to automate complex Kubernetes deployments and operations that would otherwise be out of reach to today’s DevOps teams.
How Keyva Can Help
The Keyva consulting team has focused skillsets in Ansible and OpenShift. Keyva is a Red Hat Apex partner, which is only awarded to a select group of top tier partners for services delivery in North America. The partnership gives our team access to latest technical information and training around Ansible and OpenShift.
We’re also an integration partner for Red Hat Ansible, having developed a ServiceNow module and other modules demonstrating our commitment to the platform and our ability to provide integration development capabilities besides professional services for the platform.
Our team has extensive experience in the domain of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Our engineers can support clients with strategic initiatives, development and engineering, knowledge transfer, and mentoring. Using our Ansible and OpenShift experience, we can also help create third-party integrations to extend DevOps toolchains to meet your organization’s unique requirements.