The DevOps and Automation movement has been gaining steam in recent years especially in this COVID-19 and work from home era. More and more businesses are considering implementing changes that prioritize efficiency and better collaboration between teams and thus productivity.

Automation is the backbone of DevOps.Entire DevOps pipeline containing continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment, including application performance monitoring in life is being automated.

Automating infrastructure set up and configurations and the software deployment is the key highlight of DevOps. In a nutshell, Automation,

• Removes manual errors
• Team members are empowered
• Dependency removed
• Latency removed
• Increases no of deliveries
• Reduces the lead time
• Increases frequency of releases
• Provides faster feedback
• Enables speed, reliability, and consistency

And yesterday I was lucky to get to attend an interactive session with the personnel form RedHat which is one of the leading enterprise solutions in the field of DevOps.We got some great insights at what problems enterprises are facing and how tools like Ansible help to solve that kind of problems and make the life of teams much easier. This session was mostly focused on Ansible and Ansible Tower.

The first interaction we had with "Mr Arun Eapen" (Director, APAC Service Delivery, GLS RedHat Asia Pacific) and he gave us insights to why industries need to and are moving towards automation. Few questions he asked that I'd like to share :

• Can you roll out fixes at scale?
• How do you deploy new services in a fast and efficient manner?

The answer is Automation and this is where tools like Ansible and Ansible Tower shine. Then we went ahead on with Mr Sreejith Anujan, (The Principal Instructor at Red Hat) and he showed some practical implementations and demo of how Ansible and Ansible Tower are solving the real-world use cases for the enterprises on the fly. Some of the main key points were :

• Ansible Tower takes automation to a next level by having clean GUI from where every team can hassle-free automate the jobs
• We have workflows in Ansible Tower which are just like Jenkins pipeline build into it and using them we can achieve CI/CD
• Integration of its API with modern chats systems like Slack, Twilio , etc so that team members are always updated about what's going on.
• What will happen if your machine having Automation Tool installed goes down? Ansible Tower also solves this problem of a single point of failure by using clusters.
• Moreover, Ansible Tower has its own secure database to store credentials of various platforms like AWS, etc. One great feature is that if any credential type is not supported (say Oracle Cloud) then we can create own credential type and get on to work.
• What I like the most about it is its ready integration with other third-party tools like Jenkins, GitHub, Grapahana, etc.
• Huge collection of modules officially created and certified by RedHat and partners like Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, etc. Along with it 24x7 support from company if anything goes wrong.

It was a great session overall and got to learn a lot of things and real-world use cases of industries and how ansible plays an important part to make it happen. Thanks, Vimal Daga sir and Preeti Mam to arrange such a valuable session.Thanks for really putting in this much effort for us.