The top 5 Ansible Automation Platform blogs of 2021

Year-end recaps have a way of encapsulating the most significant topics of the year, ones that sparked a curiosity to learn more, excitement to incorporate into our work, and inspiration to put our core takeaways into practice. As a newer member of the Ansible Automation Platform team, I’m always interested to learn which blogs resonate with our customers. To that end, we’re sharing our top five most read blogs so you can catch up on what you missed as well as gain some insight into what your peers are reading. For our Ansible blog aficionados, we welcome you to read alongside us for a refresher of what was most meaningful to your work this year. 

A common thread running through these posts: Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections. As you look to expand your automation in 2022, remember that there are over 100 Certified Content Collections from more than 40 partners, and Red Hat to help you jump start your next automation project with consistent and reusable modules, plug-ins and roles. 

Let’s dive in: 

5. Introduction to ansible-test

Even expert developers can make mistakes, so if you’re a busy content creator, you should always test your own Collections to make sure they play well with the Ansible environment. This post spotlights ansible-test, which lets you perform sanity, unit and integration tests to standardize your code, isolate your testing to just a module or library, and make sure your Collection performs as intended. 

4. Audit your VMware vCenter Server using Ansible

If you’re maintaining and auditing multiple VMWare servers, you can quickly gather data about your VMware vCenter Server (VCSA) without relying on SSH. This popular blog looks at the modules within the vmware.vmware_rest Content Collection, which uses the VMware vSphere REST API interface to automate common audit scenarios including retrieving and updating network configuration, checking the health of your systems, or gathering DNS information.

3. Automating ServiceNow with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) helps you create new automation workflows faster based on ServiceNow ITSM. This post examines some sample Ansible Playbooks that can help you automate incident updates and change requests, populate the ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB), and use the CMDB as an inventory source.

2. Announcing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Certified Ansible Collection

Given the popularity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it’s no surprise this blog came in as a close second on our list. Technical Marketing Manager Colin McNaugton shows how the RHEL System Roles Collection provides a path towards a repeatable and predictable operating system configuration and maintenance--even across different major release versions. 

1. Introducing Ansible Automation Platform 2

I might have been a little disappointed if this blog hadn’t clinched the number one spot! At AnsibleFest 2021, we announced significant changes to the platform including support for execution environments and the release of automation mesh, which lets you scale automation globally. This post recaps the strategy behind the re-architected platform, which supports more frequent Ansible Content Collection releases, a foundation to expand your automation use cases to edge device or cloud environments, and a more consistent, stable development environment.

Looking ahead to 2022 

While these posts were published too recently to make this list this year, they are essential reading for anyone who wants a better understanding of the Ansible Automation Platform: 

• Red Hat Brings Industry-Leading Ansible Automation Platform to Microsoft Azure
• Introducing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1
• Why 2022 will be the year for edge automation
• What's new: an introduction to automation mesh

Happy automating!