If you are experiencing growth within your organization and have to make tough decisions in the spirit of progress, solutions to keep your IT team productive are definitely in order. One of the many ways you can optimize productivity and limit mundane tasks is the ability to create scripts that eliminate repetition.
For example, in most cases, dozens or even hundreds of servers are used every day. Each of those servers has a login and authentication procedure. By creating a script in Ansible, you can automate this process and save valuable time throughout the day. This frees up precious time your employees need to solve more difficult problems.
Simplifying your cloud provisioning options is a smart strategy because changes and updates happen frequently and updating all of your servers to meet those changes is the proverbial “time killer.” Automating this process eliminates the possibility of human error and is known to improve employee morale. Incorporating Ansible into your IT department’s daily routine can show immediate results and instantly transform the way your team handles its daily activities.
If your engineers spend too much time doing simple tasks that seem more repetitive than shocking, a switch to Ansible may have the results you want. What’s even more appealing about Ansible is that YAML-coded scripts can be as simple or complex as the level of expertise of your IT team. Eliminating basic, everyday tasks will put hours back on your productivity clock, but having the knowledge to create more challenging scripts that handle multi-step processes can be a huge game changer.
The most important thing your organization has is time. Time means money. Proper use of time determines productivity and completion of tasks. There are a plethora of options on the market today. Ansible is a very attractive alternative to its competitors because it is agentless and does not require you to make manual changes to dozens of nodes. It’s convenient and easy to use, not to mention that the software is well supported with numerous modules for scripting tasks and a development team eager to answer questions.
How Ansible works
Ansible provides the framework for writing your most common and repetitive tasks, in what they call “playbooks.” Once these manuals are created, they can use the available modules (i.e. Yum or Apt modules), not only for Ansible, but also for other modules. These modules connect to the operating system tools available to perform tasks on the nodes. If a module is not available, playbooks can use command syntax to run. Basically anything that works on a node command line can be written to a playbook for Ansible.
How Rundeck works
If you decide to incorporate Ansible into your development team’s toolbox, you should seriously consider using Rundeck together. Rundeck provides the reporting, scheduling, and organizing tool your team needs to stay on point. If you are a smaller company, you will see other alternatives on the market, but they are limited in cost and do not represent a “value buy” like Rundeck.
While Ansible serves as the tool to help you create scripts, Rundeck gives you the sleek looking UI platform to make sense of it all. The ability to see historical views of each task, the end result of those tasks, and options for work assignments are an effective way to keep your entire team in communication mode and know what the team’s game plan is throughout. moment.
The perfect one-to-two mix for your Linux updates is to use Ansible with Rundeck for a streamlined approach to your work day.