How Ansible Automation Platform supports your automation community of practice

As we've shared in recent blogs, bringing teams together to form an automation community of practice can accelerate adoption of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform across your organization and help you achieve better results with your automation faster. It can also help you advance your automation maturity so you can get more value from all of your IT investments. 

Today I want to talk about some of the specific features available within Ansible Automation Platform that directly support your community of practice, particularly as you work together to: 

• Standardize your automation development tooling and experience
• Improve your user onboarding experience
• Share and reuse automation content through centralized repositories
• Create cross-functional workflows that span networking, cloud, security, etc.
• Measure your automation performance and success

Educating your community of practice members about these features will help them build expertise and allow members to operate consistently across different teams. 

Ansible VS Code extension

Depending on your community of practice members' backgrounds, some may be less familiar with VS Code, the popular source code editor that runs on the Windows, macOS or Linux desktop. VS Code's widespread adoption and sophisticated ecosystem makes it a logical choice for writing automation content within your organization. 

The Ansible extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) can significantly boost your efficiency, accuracy and proficiency when writing automation code with Ansible Automation Platform. 

Key features of the Ansible VS Code extension includes syntax highlighting, auto-completion, linting and integration with AI tools like Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant. Learn how to install and use the extension. 

Ansible development tools

Ansible development tools are a suite of integrated and supported capabilities included with Ansible Automation Platform. Recently updated and expanded and accessible through the Ansible VS Code extension, Ansible development tools allow automation engineers and developers at any skill level to consistently create, test and deploy Ansible Playbooks and collections while boosting productivity and efficiency. 

Installed as part of a curated package, Ansible development tools can help your users build Ansible execution environments, conduct sanity checks, test Ansible Playbooks and much more. Click here to learn more and get started. 

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed 

Ansible Lightspeed is a generative AI service engineered to help automation teams create, adopt and maintain Ansible content more efficiently. Connected to IBM watsonx Code Assistant, Ansible Lightspeed helps users turn their automation ideas into Ansible code through natural language prompts and content explanation and refinement. Ansible Lightspeed is accessed through the Ansible VS Code extension and generates Ansible Playbooks that adhere to Ansible best practices.

Learn how to activate Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed.

Ansible Lightspeed is also evolving into a virtual assistant chatbot that will be embedded directly into Ansible Automation Platform. Trained on Red Hat documentation and other trusted data sources, using the Ansible Lightspeed virtual assistant is like having an automation expert working along with you to support you whenever you have an Ansible-related question. 

Ansible development workspaces 

Coming soon, Ansible development workspaces offers on-demand, one-click provisioning of an Ansible-specific development environment that includes access to VS Code, Ansible development tools, Ansible Lightspeed and more to enable faster and more reliable Ansible code creation, testing and deployment. With Ansible development workspaces, you can reduce the time to configure your development environment and eliminate swivel chair operations while simplifying the content creation lifecycle. 

Ansible automation hub and private automation hub

Ansible automation hub is a central repository to discover, download and manage Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections—bundles of modules, plug-ins, roles and documentation from Red Hat and our partners. The Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections found in Ansible automation hub deliver prebuilt, fully supported and certified automation integration content from Red Hat and many of our 60+ partners, including Cisco, Microsoft, CyberArk, Dynatrace and ServiceNow. Ansible automation hub also includes Ansible validated content collections to help you automate common operational tasks based on our knowledge and expertise of Ansible best practices. 

Already an Ansible Automation Platform customer? Log in and explore Ansible automation hub. 

Private automation hub is your organization's internal repository that acts as the source of truth for all of your trusted automation content. Through the use of a private automation hub, teams can deploy content that aligns with the standards set by your community of practice in a consistent and repeatable way. 

Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub

Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub delivers an integrated experience with curated learning paths, push-button content creation, integrated development tools and other opinionated resources to help users who are new to Ansible learn quickly while supporting experienced teams with the resources they need to be more productive. 

The Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub experience serves as the central access point for your community of practice members to familiarize themselves with Ansible language and syntax, use integrated tooling to create and develop Ansible code and promote trusted automation content that adheres to organizational standards and best practices. Click here to learn more. 

Automation workflows

To move past the somewhat limited results achieved by automating only single tasks, your community of practice ultimately will need to start planning automation workflows that span multiple teams in your IT organization. As you start to build more complex workflows, you can reduce the errors as well as friction caused by waiting on teams to perform manual operations. You also can free up resource hours to focus on innovation and strategic projects.

Workflows enable you to build a sequence of disparate job templates (or workflow templates), even when they don't share common inventory, playbooks or permissions. 

See automation workflows in action.  

Event-Driven Ansible allows you to further expand your workflows to proactively respond to adverse conditions in your IT environment. You can start with a small use case, such as simple automated ticket enrichment with ServiceNow ITSM. Eventually, you can work up to full closed-loop automation where a ticket is opened, a playbook is launched to resolve the reported issue and the ticket is closed out in a single, end-to-end workflow without human intervention. You can also exert more control by forwarding the ticket to a team to perform additional root cause analysis. Determining which use cases to start with and how to pursue more advanced use cases over time should be part of your ongoing community of practice discussions. 

Automation analytics and Red Hat Insights

As your community of practice grows, you'll need to track and measure the performance of your automation and share that with users and stakeholders. This is an important step because it helps your practice identify areas for improvement and builds an internal groundswell of support for automation generally. 

With the reports and dashboards found in automation analytics, you can measure the business impact of your automation such as return on investment (ROI) or time saved. You can monitor automation job success and see which teams are struggling with their automation. Sharing these graphs and metrics with your community of practice and your executive teams can help them understand the tangible impact of your work and identify which automated tasks are delivering the biggest value to your organization. 

With Red Hat Insights, you can monitor your automation infrastructure—including the health status and configuration of systems. You can find and resolve problems such as infrastructure performance issues, system availability and security vulnerabilities. You can also use notifications from Red Hat Insights as a data source to trigger automatic remediation through Event-Driven Ansible.

Additional resources

• Uncover expert tips and advice for your automation community of practice
• Discover actionable ways to advance your automation maturity
• Enable automation learning, productivity and collaboration with Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub
• Learn how to adopt an automation developer mentality