Automation
Automation: Doing More With Less
Streamline IT Operations with Ansible Automation Services
Automation has a big push in many organizations today. However, automation is often easier to talk about than to actually implement in a beneficial way. If your organization has interest in taking advantage of automation but needs assistance in the initial push, Crossconnect can get you started down the automation journey.
WHAT WE DO
Crossconnect’s Expertise in Ansible Automation
Crossconnect’s strongest automation experience is with the Ansible platform, although we have experience with most modern platforms as well. Ansible is an open-source automation platform that can automate IT environments, systems, and devices. Ansible configurations, called Playbooks, can automate repetitive tasks in enterprise environments such as cloud or on-premises systems provisioning, specialized monitoring or configuration scripts, application deployments and more.
CASE STUDy
What kind of things can be done with Ansible?
Crossconnect has done many interesting projects with Ansible for our customers. Here is a few examples:
One of our clients ran into an issue with a third-party anti-virus software that was growing their windows registry in their servers over time until it caused boot times of the servers to reach nearly non-functional times (hours). The anti-virus vendor took several months to identify and remediate the bug. In the interim, Crossconnect was able to use scripting and Ansible Playbooks to manage the issue. Ansible was used to track registry growth across several hundred servers, find the tipping point in registry size, and then execute code to remediate the registry size before it got large enough to make the server unable to reboot in a reasonable timeframe.
Another customer was developing and deploying their own software builds for applications for their customers. For many years, this process was a mix of manual interventions and running a long list of individual scripts that had been developed over years by many different developers. This process required many hours and steps to deploy new builds. If anything went wrong, the rollback process was even worse. We automated and streamlined the process with Ansible to perform this in one step, as well as allow for easy rollback in the case of a customer issue. This saved countless hours so their developers could focus on their core competencies instead of wasting time on error-prone manual deployments.
The Bottom Line
Ansible is a great tool to automate complex and repeatable tasks.
If you have tasks that involve multiple vendors, a vendor that hasn’t implemented built-in automation, or just tasks with a high level of complexity that are prone to human error, automation may be the right answer for your organization. We can use Ansible to save time, money, and improve the accuracy of tasks all while reducing the risk of user impact and outage.