We participated in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn a few weeks ago. Jaan Tanel Veikesaar from Elering, a gas/energy company in Estonia, gave a really nice presentation about their Ansible automation project. Ansible is a very common infrastructure as code and automation tool. Below I’ll go over Jaan’s presentation, adding some comments and key takeaways.

The starting point for the Ansible automation project

The starting point at Elering was fairly typical: to create a new VM, one had to go to VSphere, launch a VM and continue from there manually. In other words, automation did not really exist. This started to change when business started to demand more from the IT without adding any more human resources. This essentially made automation a necessity instead of being a luxury. So, they did some research and testing, after which Elering ended up with Ansible. They made this choice in part because whenever an Ansible problem was encountered, they could find an answer easily from the Internet.