Simplified deployment: Step-by-step Ansible Automation Platform installation on Microsoft Azure

Imagine if you got back all the time that you spent sitting through installation and deployment screens, clicking away, waiting for your cloud infrastructure to be ready. Imagine a future with fewer keystrokes and pre-set-up tasks. Did we take you to a painful and reflective past where your time and brainpower were drained from such tasks?

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform team heard you, felt your pain, and have invested its talent into innovative and simpler ways to get our customers to customize, deploy, and get their Microsoft Azure infrastructure up and running quickly and efficiently.

How did the Ansible Automation Platform team do that? Ansible Automation Platform stands out as a versatile and powerful tool to deploy and manage infrastructure. Complementing Ansible Automation Platform’s capabilities, Ansible Content Lab collections can help you configure, deploy on Microsoft Azure, and get started on automation - faster than before and with fewer clicks.

Let’s dive straight into it:

Step 1: First things first

• A valid self-managed Ansible Automation Platform subscription from the Azure Marketplace.
• A valid Microsoft Azure subscription and access to create/manage resources.
• Download or install the collection : Ansible collection - lab.azure_deployment
• Ansible installed locally. 

Step 2: Set up Azure Credentials

This collection will deploy infrastructure resources to your Azure subscription. The Azure collection requires Ansible to authenticate using Azure credentials, which can be set in different places, such as the ~/.azure/credentials file above, through environment variables, or the Azure CLI profile. 

Step 3: Running the Playbook

Now that the initial set up is complete, we are ready to run the playbook.

The following variables are required to run the playbook. They can either be passed in the command line or updated in the vars file.

• aap_red_hat_username- This is your Red Hat account username that will be used for Subscription Management (https://access.redhat.com/management).
• aap_red_hat_password- The Red Hat account password.

In addition, the following are needed to access post deployment:

• infrastructure_database_server_user - Username that will be the admin of the new database server.
• infrastructure_database_server_password - Password of the admin of the new database server.
• aap_admin_password - The admin password to create for Ansible Automation Platform application

Once the required variables are  ready, execute using the ‘ansible-playbook’ command as detailed in the README file.

During deployment, Ansible will orchestrate the process to create the resource group, virtual network, subnets, virtual machines, and database. Virtual machines for the controller, private automation hub and Event-Driven Ansible (if enabled) are created, subscription manager registered and AAP is installed.

While all this happens, on the Azure portal, you can check all the resources as they deploy.

Lo and behold - it's all done in a jiffy (ok, ok.. maybe 30 minutes)!

Step 4: Installing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Now that the deployment is complete, we can ssh into the controller node and run the Ansible Automation Platform installer. An inventory  file is already created within the automation controller VM that the Ansible Automation Platform installer can use to install onto the provisioned resources. You can edit and make changes to this file, but you should not need to unless you intend to further customize the deployment.

Lets now run the installer playbook.

Once the Ansible Automation Platform installation is complete, the automation controller and private automation hub, and Event-Driven Ansible (depending on the platform components you configured to get installed) are ready to use! You can access them by browsing to the IP address or DNS records for the VMs that were created, then login and begin creating your project and inventories and begin your journey with automation.

Note: The Ansible collection - lab.azure_deployment used and referenced in this blog is intended to be a starting point for customers. It is recommended that you review, enhance and update your own copy as needed based on the requirements and resources required for your organization’s Ansible Automation Platform deployment.

With this example deployment, you will have access to each of the following components: automation controller, private automation hub and Event-Driven Ansible.

Next Steps

Get started right away! Download the collection, deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, and automate anywhere!

To learn more about ansible automation platform on azure

• Visit the recent blog on Self-Manged Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure
• Utilize Ansible Collections in your automation
• Explore if the Self-Managed Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure is the piece to your organization’s puzzle.
• Trusted starting point to bootstrap your automation using Ansible Validated Content