But in the meantime, you may be thinking well,
can Ansible do the CM tasks in Windows that we need given it's free and open
source and decidedly Linux‑based ecosystem? The answer is yes.
All of your garden variety stuff is here, role in
feature management in Windows server, software installation and management,
controlling services, file, IO, and directory operations,
user and group management.
And then what you may find in Ansible to be your best friend,
just issuing shell commands and PowerShell scripts in the context of your CM.
I think that you might be surprised. If you're coming to Ansible
from say system center that's very heavily graphical and then
when you see how basic Ansible is, the power is easy to overlook
given the simplicity, but I respect that simplicity a lot honestly.
Couple quick case studies here, automating large scale deployments.
So a business is concerned with managing their software deployments
across lots and lots of servers with diverse roles.
We can use Ansible playbooks that include roles and
modules for streamlining the deployment.
Now you'll understand full well what playbooks,
roles, and modules are as we go on. Implement batch processing and
parallel execution of those playbooks for efficiency.
So we've reduced employment time by 75%, minimizing
human error and achieving future growth.
Good outcome.
Let's look at continuous configuration for compliance.
You've got to subscribe or pass ISO 27001 audits.
How are you going to do that?
Well,
we can again rely upon the workhorse Ansible playbooks to perform those
regular audits and even perform auto remediation that brings machines
back into compliance with desired state.
The outcome, we're able to guarantee compliance and reduce manual effort by 60%.
These are really powerful real‑world figures.