Case Study: NASA achieves rapid cloud efficiency and faster operations with Ansible

Increasing Cloud Efficiency with Ansible and Ansible Tower

NASA, the U.S. government agency responsible for the nation’s civilian space program, needed to migrate roughly 65 applications from a traditional hardware data center to AWS for greater agility and cost savings. A rapid, “as‑is” migration left a fragmented environment across multiple VPCs and AWS accounts that was difficult to manage—routine tasks like granting administrator access, patching, and monitoring were time-consuming and operationally burdensome.

NASA implemented Ansible Tower to manage and schedule the cloud environment, improving operations, security, and team efficiency. Key results included reducing updates to nasa.gov from over an hour to under five minutes, cutting patching from days to 45 minutes, achieving near real‑time RAM and disk monitoring without agents, provisioning OS accounts across the environment in under 10 minutes, automating AMI baselining, and shrinking application stack setup from 1–2 hours to under 10 minutes.

NASA