Ansible Configuration Management
Overview
Automate infrastructure at scale with declarative playbooks. We design idempotent Ansible automation that eliminates manual server configuration, ensures compliance, and makes disaster recovery trivial. Extensive automation expertise managing large-scale server environments.
Ansible Capabilities
Idempotent Playbooks
Idempotent playbooks are the foundation of reliable automation. You can run the same playbook repeatedly without side effects, knowing that servers will always converge to the desired state regardless of their starting configuration. Design playbooks using best practices from Ansible Galaxy, with proper error handling, conditional logic, and modular role structure. Every playbook is tested in staging environments before production deployment.
Custom Role Development
Ansible roles encapsulate reusable infrastructure patterns that can be shared across projects and teams. Develop custom roles following Galaxy best practices, with clear variable interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and test coverage using Molecule. Roles are designed for maximum reusability, allowing you to compose complex infrastructure configurations from well-tested building blocks. Each role handles a specific concern, such as web server configuration, database setup, or security hardening.
AWX/Ansible Tower
AWX and Ansible Tower provide a centralised control plane for managing Ansible automation at scale. Implement and configure these platforms to give your team a web-based interface for running playbooks, managing inventories, and viewing job histories. Role-based access control ensures that team members can only execute approved playbooks against authorised infrastructure. Scheduled jobs automate routine tasks like configuration enforcement and patch management, whilst comprehensive logging provides audit trails for compliance requirements.
Dynamic Inventory
Static inventory files don't work in dynamic cloud environments where servers are constantly being created and destroyed. Configure dynamic inventory plugins that query your cloud provider's API to discover available hosts in real-time, automatically grouping servers by tags, regions, or instance types. Ensures your playbooks always target the correct servers without manual inventory updates. Support includes AWS EC2, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, and custom inventory scripts for hybrid environments.
Secret Management
Storing passwords and API keys in plain text configuration files is a security nightmare. Ansible Vault encrypts sensitive data within playbooks and variable files, allowing you to safely commit secrets to version control whilst keeping them encrypted. For more advanced requirements, integrate HashiCorp Vault to provide centralised secret management with dynamic credential generation, automatic rotation, and detailed audit logging. Playbooks retrieve secrets at runtime, ensuring credentials never appear in logs or command history.
Compliance Automation
Configuration drift occurs when manual changes accumulate on servers over time, causing production environments to diverge from the intended state. Schedule regular playbook runs that detect and remediate drift, ensuring all servers remain compliant with your security policies and configuration standards. Automated compliance checks validate that required software is installed, services are running, firewall rules are correctly configured, and security patches are applied. Detailed reports show which servers were modified and what changes were made.
CI/CD Integration
Infrastructure as code only works when changes flow through automated pipelines with proper testing and approval gates. Integrate Ansible into your CI/CD workflows, triggering playbook execution when code is merged to specific branches. Pre-deployment validation runs playbooks in check mode to preview changes without making modifications, whilst automated tests verify that infrastructure changes haven't broken application functionality. GitLab CI and GitHub Actions provide visibility into deployment history, making it easy to roll back problematic changes or audit who deployed what and when.
Multi-Platform Support
Ansible is not just for Linux servers. Develop playbooks that manage Windows servers using WinRM connectivity, configure network devices from Cisco, Juniper, and Arista using vendor-specific modules, and orchestrate cloud resources across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. This unified automation approach means your team learns one tool instead of maintaining separate automation stacks for different platforms. Playbooks can orchestrate complex workflows that span multiple platforms, such as provisioning cloud infrastructure, configuring load balancers, and deploying applications.
Our Implementation Process
Infrastructure Audit
Map your existing server estate, identify configuration patterns, and document manual processes ripe for automation.
Role & Playbook Development
Design reusable Ansible roles following Galaxy best practices with modular, testable components. Write idempotent playbooks that handle all edge cases, thoroughly tested in staging before production deployment.
Continuous Automation
Integrate Ansible into CI/CD pipelines. Schedule regular configuration enforcement to prevent drift and ensure compliance.
Key Benefits
Radical Efficiency
Automate server provisioning, configuration, and patching across thousands of hosts. What took days now takes minutes. Automated.
Infrastructure automation dramatically reduces environment setup time, enabling tasks that previously took hours to complete in minutes. Organisations report significant improvements in deployment velocity and infrastructure cost efficiency through systematic automation practices. Automated provisioning removes manual configuration errors, accelerates scaling, and frees engineers to focus on strategic work.
Guaranteed Consistency
Eliminate configuration drift. Every server matches the declared state exactly, every time. No surprises. Enforced.
Configuration drift (when manual changes accumulate on servers over time) causes production outages and increases operational costs. Ansible enforces declared state across all servers, with idempotent playbooks ensuring identical configuration regardless of starting state. Automated compliance enforcement significantly improves system reliability and reduces unexpected downtime.
Repeatable Deployments
Codify infrastructure knowledge in version-controlled playbooks. New environments spin up identically to production. Zero variance.
Version-controlled playbooks capture infrastructure knowledge that traditionally lived only in documentation or engineer memory. Declarative YAML playbooks serve as executable documentation, ensuring development, staging, and production environments remain identical. Teams can spin up new environments with confidence that configuration matches production exactly, significantly reducing environment setup time and human error.
Rapid Recovery
Rebuild failed servers from scratch in minutes. Ansible playbooks are self-documenting disaster recovery runbooks. Automated.
When disaster strikes, Ansible playbooks become executable recovery procedures. No consulting documentation or remembering manual steps required. Consistent rebuild processes eliminate human error and dramatically reduce recovery time. Production servers can be reconstructed from bare metal to fully configured through automated playbook execution.
Related Services
- Linux Server Management: Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL server setup and configuration with Ansible automation
- DevOps & CI/CD: Integrate Ansible into GitLab pipelines for automated infrastructure deployment
Complementary Services
- PHP Legacy Refactoring: Automated deployment pipelines for modernised PHP applications
- Magento Maintenance: Automated patching and configuration management for Magento platforms
- Team Process Improvement: Standardised deployment processes and runbooks for development teams
Expertise
Extensive experience building and maintaining large-scale automation with Ansible. We design playbooks and roles that are reusable, testable, and production-ready. Every automation implementation includes documentation, testing procedures, and integration with CI/CD pipelines. We help organisations eliminate manual configuration overhead and achieve consistent, reliable infrastructure.
Service Category
CREATE // INFRASTRUCTURE // ANSIBLE
