How Microsoft uses Ansible Automation
This is a case study on how Microsoft solves their use cases using Ansible Automation.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows.
Creating Automation Environment
Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft created a standardized, centralized network automation environment that reduces routine, repeatable tasks, and complexity. Because of this, DevOps teams can now focus on sharing knowledge, building skills, and creating innovative technology solutions. Microsoft is working with its strategic partner RedHat to adopt RedHat products like Red Hat Ansible Tower and Red Hat Ansible Engine. These both are now a part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform running in Microsoft Azure.
Engineers now automate repeatable, day-to-day tasks by deploying Ansible Playbooks to the network through a centralized playbook version control system. Additionally, these three environments support a collaborative DevOps approach across the company’s network and engineering teams.
Standardized Network Automation
Microsoft has used its staged Ansible environments to automate routine, time-consuming engineering tasks, such as the delivery of logic-based changes to ensure services are available to customers. Events in the network trigger other workflows, such as advanced telemetry, ticketing, logging, and analytics. Automating also helps the company follow a phased, iterative approach to code creation that protects code quality with scheduled releases of tested, verified network configurations.
Saved Thousands of Hours of Operational Work
Implementing Ansible has helped Microsoft save thousands of work hours per year, including several weeks' worth of work by reducing production downtime and network configuration defects. Microsoft turned to Ansible to improve the productivity of hundreds of engineers across 600 locations worldwide. Those engineers use Ansible for designing, building, and deploying IT networks at scale, and the use of Ansible Automation has saved an estimated 3,000 work hours per year and reduced downtime.
By completing code peer reviews and gated check-ins through preproduction environments, the company has reduced the number of defects and bugs introduced into its production environment. This approach ultimately reduces major incidents and outages, improving network quality.
They looked at the types of alerts and tickets that their help desk was getting, and they were able to write automation to take care of almost most of the incidents. Microsoft is now able to close about 97-98% of the tickets that come in via automation.