We proudly announce that we’re the official Ansible partner here in Switzerland.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is a simple and agentless configuration management, remote execution and orchestration tool, completely written in Python.
It was invented by Michael DeHaan, the creator of Cobbler. DeHaan wasn’t happy about the existing configuration management products on the market, and started something completely new. Apparently he wasn’t the only “unhappy” technician out there, because it is currently forked over 3’500 and starred approx. 12’000 times on github. In 2013 Ansible was one of the top 5 projects on github, with over 800 unique contributors & over one million downloads.
The company behind the product, Ansible Inc. is providing support, engineering and services for two different products:
- The Core, which is free & open-source
- The Tower, which is the web interface on top of the Core.
So you think Ansible is better?
For our (small) environment, and some of our customers enterprise environments: YES, we think it suits better. But “better” is a hard term, because it’s always based on personal opinions.
Sometimes customers ask us, why should we choose Ansible over XYZ, or why should we move away from XYZ? Can Ansible really do more for us than the XYZ? In our opinion, it isn’t the “what” it is doing, it is more the “how” Ansible is doing things differently. It’s really simple – and yes we know, every tool claims to be simple. But Ansible is really really simple, and there’s a really low learning curve. The simplicity of Ansible is where most customers are astonished, and why a lot of different people and companies already switch to Ansible. Even if you’re new into Ansible, you already have successful results in half a day, and you don’t need to be an expert.
But in the end, we just want to be honest with you: Just have a look at 3 or 4 different products – Ansible included of course 😉 – and decide what product you like the most. For example, if you’re completely happy with Puppet, the DSL they’ve invented and coding Ruby, then you might just be OK with it, therefore you don’t need anything else. But if you think there are things that are just too complicated, then you should might have a look at Ansible. In the end you should choose the product with the highest acceptance of your engineers, because they need to work with it all day long. The happier they are with the product, the happier is the result and your environment 🙂
Where can I get Ansible?
The Ansible Core is available on github, on PyPi and probably in the repository of your operating system provider (e.g. EPEL).
The Ansible Tower is the enterprise web interface on top of the core and isn’t open-source. You can get more informations about the Tower on Ansible Tower website.
If you want to get started with Ansible, you should really have a look at their documentation, which in our opinion is outstanding.
Long story short, to install Ansible on Debian or Ubuntu systems:
apt-get update apt-get install python-pip pip install ansible
To install Ansible on RedHat, Fedora or CentOS:
yum install python-pip pip install ansible
What kind of services are Ansible & confirm IT solutions providing?
Of course, Ansible Inc. is supporting and developing the Core & Tower. They’re still a small company, so they’re really agile and dynamic. Of course they’ve a great team of developers, for support and development of new features as well.
We’re supporting Ansible Inc. here in Switzerland, by providing consulting services for the Core and the Tower. We’ve a lot of experience with enterprise installations, and we can show you the benefits of using Ansible in your IT environment.
Feel free to contact us, if you’re interested in the Core or Tower. We can do an offline demo, or we can schedule an online demo in corporation with the technical guys of Ansible Inc.
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