How ansible helped Schwarz Group- a case study
Ansible has become the most famous tool for the industries now. It has solved lots of industry use cases by seamlessly uniting workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in one easy-to-use and deploy platform.
one of the reason of its popularity is its simplicity to use, anyone can learn very easily, it is powerful and provides agentless automation with solving almost every use case. one of the company that it helped a lot is schwarz group.
The Schwarz Group is a German, privately owned retail group that operates more than 12,500 stores globally. It has two retail brands, Lidl and Kaufland, as well as production and waste management services brand Pre Zero. Lidl is a global discount supermarket chain consisting of 11,000 stores, while Kaufland is a hypermarket chain with 1,100 stores, focused on providing a large number of variety items at discount. The Schwarz Group is the fourth largest retailer in the world based on revenue.
Initially they were using puppet to support more than 1,000 SAP systems and 28PB of datacenter-hosted storage. Each Schwarz store operates a Storeserver, a central operational system installed by the company’s local IT team that controls a range of store functions, from checkout kiosk systems and closed-captioning security (CCTV) to recycling and reward programs, but to improve user management and authorization, Schwarz IT sought to introduce controlled, efficient self-service capabilities to speed deployment processes and they found ansible tower((now part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform). Due to complex and time-intensive processes, the community version did not work to their satisfaction.
The group now runs more than 5,000 Ansible Automation Platform jobs each day to manage its Storeservers. Full migration of its Storeserver environment from Puppet is expected to be completed in 2021.
Some of the benefits that this company got are:
- Improved delivery time for new applications- The Schwarz Group rapidly opens stores when entering new markets — up to 200 stores in one year in some regions. Automating workflows and management with Ansible helped Schwarz create and launch innovative digital services to stores — from dynamic digital signs to intelligent checkout queue management — while maintaining central control and visibility into operations worldwide.
- Enhanced in-house automation expertise to save management and development time- Schwarz IT’s teams have successfully used their new knowledge to replace custom, team-specific installation and update scripts with a centralized, automated approach for tasks like operating system updates.
- Improved risk management with role-based system access- With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Schwarz IT can more effectively balance controlling system access by authorized application and development with desired self-service capabilities. Role-based access control means application teams can run automatic deployments as regular users — without requiring root access to critical core business systems. “This feature provides high-level consistency while letting individuals be proactive in working on new and existing projects,” said Kuehner.
Some of the very useful features that ansible provides are:
PROVISIONING
Your apps have to live somewhere. If you’re PXE booting and kickstarting bare-metal servers or VMs, or creating virtual or cloud instances from templates, Ansible and Red Hat® Ansible® Tower help streamline the process.
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.
CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
Centralizing configuration file management and deployment is a common use case for Ansible, and it’s how many power users are first introduced to the Ansible automation platform.
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
Creating a CI/CD pipeline requires buy-in from numerous teams. You can’t do it without a simple automation platform that everyone in your organization can use. Ansible Playbooks keep your applications properly deployed (and managed) throughout their entire lifecycle.
SECURITY AUTOMATION
When you define your security policy in Ansible, scanning and remediation of site-wide security policy can be integrated into other automated processes and instead of being an afterthought, it’ll be integral in everything that is deployed.
ORCHESTRATION
Configurations alone don’t define your environment. You need to define how multiple configurations interact and ensure the disparate pieces can be managed as a whole. Out of complexity and chaos, Ansible brings order.
Ansible is now becoming one of the most demanded technologies, especially in the devops world and everyone should learn it!!
