How Ansible + GlobalSSH Accelerates Multi‑Data‑Center Deployments by 32%

What is Ansible

Ansible is a simple, agent‑less automation, orchestration, and configuration‑management tool that communicates with remote nodes via SSH.

UCloud Ansible Use Cases

UCloud heavily uses Ansible for data‑center product deployment and large‑scale gray‑release systems, improving deployment efficiency and simplifying rollback and control.

Overseas Multi‑Data‑Center Deployment

Using Ansible, UCloud centrally deploys services to overseas nodes (e.g., Lagos, Ho Chi Minh) from a management center in Beijing/Shanghai, connecting via SSH to the remote cloud hosts.

Deployments over low‑bandwidth or high‑latency networks can suffer from slow SSH channel creation and file transfer.

GlobalSSH

GlobalSSH is a UCloud PaaS product that leverages high‑performance IaaS components, intelligent DNS, and GRE/NAT forwarding to provide accelerated, low‑latency cross‑region SSH connections.

Ansible Playbook Deployment

Integration steps:

Create cloud hosts in Beijing and Lagos with GlobalSSH enabled.

Write a simple Playbook that gathers facts, copies a package, and installs it via yum.

Configure a hosts file that sets ansible_ssh_host to the GlobalSSH domain.

Run the Playbook with ansible-playbook.

---
- hosts: all
  tasks:
  - name: copy test
    copy: src=/data/MySQL-devel-5.6.41-1.el6.x86_64.rpm dest=/data/test
  - name: install mysql-devel
    yum: name=/data/MySQL-devel-5.6.41-1.el6.x86_64.rpm state=present

[all]
152.32.140.39 ansible_ssh_pass=example ansible_ssh_host=152.32.140.39.ipssh.net

Test Comparison (Playbook)

Running the Playbook ten times shows a clear speed advantage when using GlobalSSH.

Using external IP: total 10m52.197s, average 65.20s.

Using GlobalSSH domain: total 7m21.898s, average 44.19s, 32.23% faster.

Ansible Ad‑hoc Mode

GlobalSSH also improves the performance of Ad‑hoc commands, which are similar to pssh but support all Ansible modules.

time for i in `seq 1 10`; do ansible -i hosts_nrly all -m shell -a "cat /var/log/messages"; done

time for i in `seq 1 10`; do ansible -i hosts_nrly_1 all -m shell -a "cat /var/log/messages"; done

Test Comparison (Ad‑hoc)

Using external IP: total 3m17.427s, average 19.74s.

Using GlobalSSH domain: total 1m23.983s, average 8.40s, 57.45% faster.

Conclusion

Ansible is a widely adopted DevOps tool, and integrating GlobalSSH into Ansible deployments easily eliminates SSH‑induced latency, significantly improving deployment speed and reliability across global data centers.