Challenge

The bank had to migrate thousands of Ansible Playbooks from legacy platform to AAP 2.4 and ensure compatibility with Ansible 2.15. These playbooks were created over the course of nearly a decade and followed different patterns as Ansible evolved over time. As teams were spread around the globe, they also developed their own common practices, which resulted in the Ansible Playbooks being inconsistent. Fixing these issues manually would have required years of engineering effort for the bank, a number of highly skilled Ansible experts to understand the changes required, and would have been a major obstacle to modernization, automation scaling, and operational efficiency.

Solution

Using Steampunk Spotter’s automated scanning capabilities, combined with the experience of highly skilled Steampunk Ansible experts, the bank was able to quickly identify over 130,000 errors and necessary changes in their Ansible Playbooks. These ranged from outdated syntax and the use of deprecated Ansible content to behavioral changes in Ansible modules. Spotter’s rewrite feature automatically resolved 68,000 of these errors—more than half—in seconds, with no manual input required. Spotter’s customization features, such as custom policies and supply chain management, enable automatic resolution and improved guidance for manual fixes of the remaining errors.

Results

By automating half of the fixes alone, the client not only achieved its migration goals eight times faster with Spotter than with an in-house solution, but also realized an immediate and significant return on investment, proving the power of automation in large-scale infrastructure projects. Spotter automation has saved around 13,000 hours of manual work, which equates to almost seven full years of continuous work. This efficiency gain translates into a remarkable return on investment of 512%.