Ansible Consulting

Ansible is an agentless automation platform used for configuration management, application deployment, and operational runbooks across infrastructure. DevOps, platform, and operations teams use it to replace manual, inconsistent changes with repeatable automation defined in YAML playbooks, improving reliability across servers, cloud instances, and network devices.

Ansible typically connects over SSH for Linux/Unix and WinRM for Windows, so it can apply changes without installing agents. Automation is commonly organized into reusable roles and collections and executed from a workstation, CI/CD pipelines, or centralized orchestration to standardize day-to-day operations.

• Enforce baseline configuration and desired state across environments
• Orchestrate multi-step deployments, maintenance tasks, and safe restarts
• Automate patching, compliance checks, and remediation workflows
• Provision and configure resources across cloud and on-prem systems
• Share and version reusable automation via roles, collections, and modules

With the rise of Infrastructure-as-Code tools for provisioning infrastructure (such as Terraform), and Orchestration tools for running containers (such as Kubernetes), the need for Configuration Management decreased as it was used mostly to configure Operating Systems and provision resources.

However, there are still use-cases where companies manage the servers' Operating System directly, and they do so using Configuration Management tools.

A number of examples where managing the servers directly is required:

1. Bare-Metal or On-Premise servers
   Can't provision infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code tools (such as Terraform), and can't use fully-managed services for orchestration such as Kubernetes.
   In such cases Configuration Management tools will be used to manage groups of servers, install the applications' dependencies & configuration, and perhaps even install an orchestration tool such as Kubernetes.
2. Specific system requirements
   A given company might choose not to use an orchestration tool as a result of specific system requirements.
   An example would be a company that provides an SDK that communicates with the company's servers, and is implemented in clients' apps and systems, with a requirement by the clients that the SDK takes less than 5ms to respond.
   In that case the networking toll orchestration systems like Kubernetes have on every request will be unacceptable, and so that company will be forced to optimize for a very simple network topology with minimal "hops" between different parts of the system.

There is also the case where companies started with Configuration Management as their main way of building a platform for the developers, and the coupling to the Configuration Management tool became too complicated to be worth "untangling" in the short-term or even mid-term.

Ansible is an agentless automation platform used to standardize configuration, orchestrate deployments, and run operational tasks across infrastructure. It is commonly adopted to reduce manual toil, improve consistency between environments, and make change execution repeatable and auditable.

• Agentless execution over SSH or WinRM avoids installing and maintaining host agents, reducing operational overhead and compatibility issues.
• Idempotent tasks converge systems to a desired state, making playbooks safer to rerun for remediation and drift correction.
• Human-readable YAML playbooks support peer review and Git-based change control, improving traceability and auditability.
• Large module and collection ecosystem covers common Linux and Windows administration, middleware, network devices, and cloud services.
• Inventory grouping and variable precedence enable shared baselines while supporting per-environment and per-host differences.
• Roles and collections encourage reuse and standardization, reducing duplicated logic and improving long-term maintainability.
• Orchestration features support ordered workflows such as rolling updates, dependency sequencing, and coordinated service restarts.
• Secrets handling via Ansible Vault and integrations with external secret stores help keep credentials out of repositories and logs.
• Push-based runs work well for controlled change windows, targeted operations on subsets of hosts, and ad hoc incident response actions.
• CI/CD integration enables consistent provisioning, configuration, and deployment steps as part of delivery pipelines.

Ansible is typically a strong fit for teams that want straightforward automation with clear review workflows and minimal host footprint. For very large fleets or high-frequency automation, execution scaling, inventory design, and RBAC often require additional architecture and may benefit from AWX or Automation Controller.

Common alternatives include Puppet, Chef, SaltStack, and cloud-native options such as AWS Systems Manager.

Our experience with Ansible across infrastructure and application operations helped us build repeatable automation patterns, reusable roles, and delivery playbooks that we now apply to client environments to reduce manual work and improve reliability.

Some of the things we did include:

• Built standardized Ansible roles for Linux baseline configuration (users, SSH, packages, time sync, logging) to keep fleets consistent across environments.
• Automated provisioning and post-provision configuration for cloud VMs, turning “day-two” tasks into predictable, version-controlled playbooks.
• Implemented application deployment workflows with rolling updates and safe rollbacks, including templated configuration and secrets handling per environment.
• Integrated Ansible into CI/CD pipelines (including Jenkins) to run linting, dry-runs, and gated deployments from pull requests.
• Connected Ansible with Terraform to separate infrastructure provisioning from configuration management while keeping end-to-end automation coherent.
• Automated Kubernetes-adjacent operations such as bootstrapping nodes, managing add-on configurations, and orchestrating cluster maintenance around Kubernetes workloads.
• Hardened servers with security baselines (CIS-style controls, SSH hardening, patching routines) and produced audit-friendly evidence via idempotent runs.
• Standardized inventory and variable management for multi-account/multi-region setups, reducing drift and improving change traceability.
• Implemented observability and operational automation by deploying monitoring agents and automating common remediation actions triggered by alerts.
• Created modular playbooks and custom filters/plugins to encapsulate organization-specific workflows and reduce duplication across teams.

This hands-on delivery work helped us accumulate significant knowledge across multiple Ansible use-cases, enabling us to deliver high-quality Ansible setups that are maintainable, secure, and scalable for client operations.

Some of the things we can help you do with Ansible include:

• Assess your current automation and Ansible codebase, delivering a prioritized review report covering reliability, maintainability, and risk.
• Create an Ansible adoption roadmap that standardizes environments, roles/collections, inventory strategy, and release workflows.
• Implement and refactor playbooks and roles for repeatable configuration management, application deployment, and day-2 operations.
• Integrate Ansible into CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins or GitLab CI) with testing, approvals, and environment promotion.
• Establish security guardrails: secrets management, least-privilege execution, hardened baselines, and compliance-friendly audit trails.
• Optimize performance and cost by reducing run times, improving idempotency, minimizing drift, and tuning parallelism and fact gathering.
• Design scalable inventories and templating patterns for multi-account/multi-region and multi-environment deployments.
• Combine Ansible with IaC and provisioning workflows (including Terraform) for consistent build-and-config pipelines.
• Improve troubleshooting and operability with structured logging, run reporting, and integrations with monitoring/alerting workflows.
• Enable your team through hands-on training, coding standards, documentation, and pair-programming to sustain best practices.