Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide

Introduction

Automation has helped companies operate efficiently since the industrial revolution.

While IT automation, including scripts, hasn’t been around for quite that long, it’s increasingly commonplace in many organizations. In fact, according to a recent pulse survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, automation is so widespread that 68% of respondents agree that IT automation at their organization has shifted from a "nice to have" to a "must have" in the past 12 months.

At the simplest level, these tend to be repeatable, task-based processes that often require both scale and precision, such as a security patch or a version update on a solution.

Automation has helped companies operate efficiently since the industrial revolution.

Done manually, such tasks can be monotonous, making them prone to human error—particularly when repeated hundreds or even thousands of times. This combination of factors makes automation an ideal way to improve these types of processes, especially in scenarios where IT teams are asked to do more with less.

Organizations also frequently use in-house automation, such as scripting, that solves specific short-term problems but is not scalable or sustainable in the long term. While critical for that individual process, using scripting in this way is a good example of automation in isolation.

Although many organizations are dabbling in automation– 73% of surveyed executives said their organization had an automation initiative underway2 –they’re approaching it with point solutions rather than a holistic view. Taking this approach can increase costs, result in duplicate efforts, require expertise on multiple platforms, and build barriers between functions and departments.

Many companies strive to use automation more strategically across their organizations. Automating IT functions is key to their success. In fact, 451 Research found that 20% of surveyed companies expect their IT processes will be automated in the next year.3

A holistic approach to automation is ideal in environments that need to solve more than operational needs and require:

  • Responsive IT services.
  • Faster innovation, where event-driven automation techniques can free teams from high-volume and repetitive, yet necessary, tasks so they can focus on key priorities.
  • The management of networks that are expanding in scope and complexity, such as edge solutions, complex multicloud platforms, and remote users.
  • The constant need to address security and compliance risks across all aspects of IT.
  • An adherence to internal policies and service-level agreements (SLAs).
  • Scalability to meet evolving needs.
  • Integration with other platforms.
  • A platform that is simple to learn and use.

Automation in the past 12 months1

68%

say that IT automation at their organization is a “must have.”

80%

say that adopting IT automation is “extremely important” to the future success of their organization.1

The right IT automation solution can unify teams and processes across an organization, ultimately transforming the way IT is delivered. So how do you create an automation-first approach for your organization?

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform supports extensive possibilities and is designed with hybrid cloud infrastructure in mind. It is a flexible, scalable, and multifaceted automation solution that works across your enterprise, wherever your organization might be in its automation journey. Ansible Automation Platform can also be used across IT teams, from systems and network administrators to developers and managers.

With the addition of event-driven automation, Ansible Automation Platform gains more capabilities, which means your investment goes even further. The benefits of event-driven automation are far-reaching and include the ability to manage massive amounts of complexity across clouds, the multidevice remote workforce, and growing edge implementations. For many businesses, maintaining resilience and reliability is essential, and event-driven automation helps teams become hyper efficient in meeting these needs while also working around resource constraints and skills gaps.

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB IT will fall behind if it doesn’t innovate and automate. Now is the time for the next evolution.” [4]

Jevin Jensen

Research Vice President, Infrastructure and Operations, IDC

Event-Driven Ansible is a possible game changer for digital enterprises needing to provide a highly resilient and consistent customer experience.5

Use this e-book as your concise guide to Ansible Automation Platform, its benefits, and information to help you make the right decisions for your organization's automation practice.

Use this e-book as your concise guide to Ansible Automation Platform, its benefits, and information to help you make the right decisions for your organization's automation practice.

A brief look at Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

To understand Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you first need to understand Red Hat. For more than 25 years, Red Hat has delivered open source solutions hardened for stability that simplify how organizations work across platforms and environments and address enterprise IT challenges. Red Hat has a long history of participating in open source community projects, and the work around Ansible Automation Platform is no exception.

A vibrant and enthusiastic community of people contributes to and relies on the Ansible project, and they continue to extend this technology into a more flexible and robust solution every day. Upstream developers help expand its ability to support enterprise ecosystems.

25 years

That's how long Red Hat has delivered open source solutions hardened for stability that simplify how organizations work across platforms and environments and address enterprise IT challenges.

The Ansible community is vibrant

Red Hat is evolving the platform to meet ongoing complexities of hybrid cloud computing, digital transformation, and other initiatives and to be flexible enough to meet future challenges. At the same time, Red Hat is committed to helping the Ansible community to grow and thrive.

The business value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Investments in automation are being prioritized across many areas, according to Red Hat’s 2022 Global Tech Outlook.7 The report found 28% of respondents said IT operations automation is a top IT technology funding priority over the next year, which is up 2 percentage points from the previous year’s research.

Over the next 12 months, what are your company’s top IT technology funding priorities?

See how Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations adopt a culture of collaborative automation.

Watch the video

Why is automation gaining traction year over year?

There are several potential reasons, but one of the biggest is the quantifiable business value of automation— and particularly of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. According to research from IDC, customers using Ansible Automation Platform to support business needs and to improve IT and application development operations could see a 5-year return on investment (ROI) of 667%, with a 10-month payback on investment.8

Based on interviews with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform users, the report also found that organizations could benefit from the positive effects of:

Reliability:

  • 76% reduction in unplanned downtime
  • 30% more efficient IT security teams

IT staff:

  • 30% more efficient IT infrastructure teams
  • 29% more efficient network infrastructure management teams
  • 75% faster deployment of new storage resources
  • 39% more applications developed per year

DevOps efficiencies by activity:

  • 50% improvement in securing
  • 48%improvement in provisioning
  • 38% improvement in configuring

DevOps teams’ day-to-day tasks:

  • 25% less time spent on maintenance work
  • 59% more time spent on innovation and other activities

Want to find out more about how to champion IT automation across your organization?

Read The IT executive’s guide to automation

Organizations around the globe are finding similar business benefits using Ansible Automation Platform.

From improving efficiencies and delivering digital services faster to freeing up critical resources to focus on higher-value projects, these organizations are recognizing the advantages of taking a holistic automation approach:

Icon-Red_Hat-Media_and_documents-Quotemark_Open-B-Red-RGB Red Hat was seen as the only viable vendor to provide both the technology and services we needed. We tried the community version of Ansible, but we cannot spend too much time learning by ourselves. We need enterprise support.

Ruby Li

Systems and DevOps Manager, Hong Kong Jockey Club

3 advantages of implementing Ansible Automation Platform in your organization:

  1. Greater efficiency
    Your staff can spend more time making a bigger impact on your business. Leave the rote repetition to automation.
  2. Better reliability
    When you reduce human intervention, you encounter fewer oversights and issues because everything happens in the same way—every time. Have confidence that you know exactly when processes, tests, updates, workflows, and other tasks are going to happen, how long they’ll take, and that you can trust the outcomes.
  3. Transparent governance
    Minimize the potential consequences of knowledge gaps. With a holistic automation approach, you have better control over your entire organization and an improved vantage point over any missed steps, not to mention audit trails and other information you need to align with compliance goals.

Now that we've looked at the benefits of using Ansible Automation Platform, it’s time to explore how to access those benefits, including some of the top features of the platform, in Chapter 3.

A closer look at Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Whether you want to automate infrastructure, applications, networks, containers, security, your cloud environment, or all of the above, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help you create, manage, and scale automation in 1 place.

1. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses playbooks in YAML format.

Ansible Playbooks are regularly used to automate administration functions, such as orchestration, configuration, management, and deployment. A playbook is written in YAML syntax and contains 1 or more plays, which are used to define a web service or an application. YAML is human readable and easy to understand, and it can be used with other programming languages, such as Ruby, Python, or Bash.

Each play within a playbook can run 1 or more tasks, and each task invokes an Ansible module, which is used to accomplish automation tasks in Ansible Automation Platform.

Because Ansible Automation Platform uses the easy-to-use YAML syntax, users who don't write programming language code can automate infrastructure with confidence. Note that Event-Driven Ansible uses rulebooks instead of playbooks, also written in YAML, that contain conditional if-then rules to drive the right automated actions. These rulebooks are able to call existing Ansible Playbooks too.

2. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is agentless.

One of the most powerful and unique features of Ansible Automation Platform is that it’s agentless, which means that you don’t need to install an agent on any machines you manage. This feature makes Ansible Automation Platform extremely scalable, as it can rapidly manage multiple machines or systems simultaneously.

3. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is built for the hybrid cloud.

As hybrid and multicloud computing models continue to expand, IT organizations need automation platforms that can bridge from traditional systems to modern services to the far edge of the network.

To make your automation projects highly portable and scalable, Ansible Automation Platform includes automation execution environments. These automation execution environments help create self-contained automation that packages all dependencies needed to build, run, and manage automation across hybrid cloud infrastructure and to the edge of the network.

Whether you’re modernizing and moving workloads to the cloud environment, implementing DevSecOps, or finding new ways to manage a growing network of edge devices, Ansible Automation Platform can fulfill diverse needs across multiple processes. Ansible Automation Platform will soon be available through leading hyperscalers' marketplaces, making it even simpler to start automating across your public and hybrid cloud environments and efficiently integrate with the cloud services you are already using.

4. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has built-in compliance and governance constructs.

From role-based access controls (RBAC) that allow administrators to assign permissions, privileges, and roles to users to encryption, audit trails, and inventory controls, Ansible Automation Platform has the tools necessary to keep your organization compliant and aligned with SLAs.

5. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes event-driven automation.

Event-driven automation is the next step in the journey to end-to-end automation. It answers the need to connect intelligence, analytics, and service requests for an IT environment to automated actions so that activities can take place in a single motion. This model is ideal for high-volume, routine tasks and IT service management (ITSM) actions, along with responding to changing IT conditions and more.

Event-driven automation works by allowing for a predefined and automated response when a certain type of event occurs. For example, in a typical IT operation, a system outage can send an alert that automatically triggers a specific action like logging a trouble ticket, gathering the facts needed for troubleshooting, or performing an action, such as a reboot—all without manual steps. In a similar way, event-driven automation can help teams respond to a variety of additional Day 2 operational needs, such as configuration management, edge device management, provisioning, user management, tuning and scalability, and more.

These are only a few of the features and benefits that you can expect from Ansible Automation Platform. Read more about how Ansible Automation Platform brings teams and systems together. Learn more

Red Hat

1 platform for your entire automation team

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is designed to set your entire automation team up for success.

Breaking down barriers between systems and teams across the organization, Ansible Automation Platform gives diversified teams the automation tools they need for their specific roles while collaborating with a connected, supported, and security-focused, enterprise-wide solution.

See how different members of your automation team can benefit from using Ansible Automation Platform.

Developers and automation creators

Automation developers need tools that can help them create Ansible Playbooks, Ansible Roles, and modules and then test them locally to ensure they run the same way when moved to production. Automation developers can benefit from DevOps tooling and plug-ins, access to pre-existing certified content to build from, and container-native architecture for both building and testing.

The right tools for automation developers:

  • Automation execution environments
    Automation execution environments provide automation developers with a consistent environment from development to production, which means developers can focus on the automation content itself without worrying about dependencies and drift between each stage.
  • Ansible content tool
    Execution environment builder helps automation developers build custom automation execution environments with the precise Ansible content and dependencies needed to support their automation. The automation content navigator lets users run and validate the content they create within the context of the execution environment itself.
  • Ansible Content Collections
    Ansible content can be created and managed internally for your organizations to use. However, curated content is also available from Red Hat through Ansible Content Collections. These collections provide developers with the option of building on curated automation content, which includes more than 100 certified collections and more than 40,000 modules.
  • Ansible automation hub
    This hosted service is the place for users to find and use supported Ansible Content Collections, which contains modules, roles, and plug-ins, along with the documentation you need to get started.

Automation architects

Tasked with elevating automation across teams to align with IT processes and with streamlining adoption, automation architects need tools that not only expand automation across the organization but ones that can also help to manage automation policy and governance. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides container-native architecture, which offers flexibility when automation architects must plan for future and current needs. Additionally, automation architects benefit from Ansible Automation Platform’s agentless framework, along with the entire Ansible technology ecosystem, which integrates efficiently with existing investments.

The right tools for automation architects:

  • Automation execution environments
    Automation execution environments represent a change in architecture for Ansible Automation Platform 2. By separating the control plane and the execution plane, Ansible Automaton Platform can provide better scalability. For example, networking or cloud teams have their own standardized execution environment specific to their needs while developers have a standardized environment that frees them from worrying about dependencies.
  • Automation controller 
    Automation controller standardizes how automation is initiated, delegated, audited, and deployed, allowing organizations to automate with confidence and reduce automation sprawl and variance across the enterprise. This management interface also decreases the complexity of your automation efforts and prevents drift between development and production.
  • Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection
    This prebuilt collection of automation content allows developers to build on what already exists and helps operations teams make the most of existing automation, accessible through the Ansible automation hub hosted service. Curated content that is developed in-house and from Red Hat and other sources can be made available through private automation hub as well.
  • Automation mesh 
    Automation mesh provides a simple, flexible, and reliable way to scale the automation of large inventories across diverse network topologies, platforms, and teams. Architects require a solution that meets all of their current requirements and can scale to address future needs, all while integrating with current technologies and providing support and adherence to SLAs. Automation mesh helps architects by creating a layer to connect networks and environments in a way that provides flexibility without compromising security.
  • Event-Driven Ansible This is a highly flexible solution used to create advanced end-to-end automation scenarios for a wide variety of needs across your IT operation and can help increase efficiency across IT operations, resolve issues quickly, and help alleviate staffing and skills challenges. As part of Ansible Automation Platform, it is highly flexible and designed for simplicity and ease of use. For example, you can use familiar YAML to create Ansible Rulebooks, which are similar to Ansible Playbooks but use if-then scenarios instead.
  • Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 
    Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is designed to help teams better understand their automation usage across the organization, along with the health of automation tasks that may need to be fine-tuned. It establishes common approaches and practices to automation workflows. Insights for Ansible Automation Platform is also relevant for architects because it lets them view different reports to better understand automation consumption across their organization.

Learn more about how automation architects can build with an automation-first mindset in The automation architect’s handbook.

System or cloud operators and administrators

System or cloud operators need to automate with speed and efficiency, so understanding what prebuilt, certified content is available is essential.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides architecture and tooling that support standardization, compliance, and governance to help manage automation teams at scale.

Charged with reliably configuring, deploying, running, and managing automation for multiple teams and applications inside their organization, automation administrators need a solution that’s simple. Ansible Automation Platform is designed to be consistent and highly reliable with an extremely low learning curve for new users. Automation administrators benefit from using both hosted service and private versions of the automation hub, where content is centrally shared and managed, and real-time analytics and reporting using Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The right tools for automation operators and administrators:

  • Automation services catalog 
    Designed to reduce service desk ticket requests for common services, the automation services catalog empowers users to manage requests themselves. This self-service capability makes modeling and delivery easier, as automation operators can take advantage of automation along with automation developers and architects.
  • Automation controller 
    All automation team members interact with or rely on the automation controller, and it’s up to automation administrators and operators to ensure the automation platform and framework are operational. Their administrative tasks are aided by automation controller’s user interface, browsable application programming interface (API), RBAC, job scheduling, integrated notifications, graphical inventory management, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) integrations, and workflow visualizer functions.
  • Ansible automation hub 
    Ansible automation hub is a portal that gives users direct access to trusted content collections from Red Hat and certified partners. This Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) automation hub is a container image repository serving cloud environments and is synchronized with the automation controller through a container registry credential.
  • Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 
    Insights for Ansible Automation Platform helps keep the automation solution running efficiently and simplifies optimization by reporting on automation projects across your infrastructure and pinpointing where specific jobs are failing.
  • Private automation hub 
    The execution environment container image repository for Ansible Automation Platform, the private automation hub, is hosted locally. It is intended for organizations running Ansible Automation Platform on physical or virtual machines.
  • Automation mesh 
    Automation mesh helps operations teams deliver services at the ever-increasing pace of their organization without having to understand the details of the automation foundation itself. Automation mesh manages dependencies and scales consistently without requiring knowledge of ancillary tools. The automation mesh architecture allows central control and distributed execution through execution nodes, moving automation closer to the endpoints and allowing a flexible architecture that can adapt to customer specific needs.
  • Event-Driven Ansible 
    Event-driven automation can be used to automatically complete tasks across your environment, including routine management needs, issue remediation, and automated responses, such as self-service. Tasks performed many hundreds or thousands of times across your organization are great candidates to automate. For example, tasks that automation could help with include management of storage or capacity associated with a key application, continual tweaks to a key underlying technology, or proactively addressing security risks.
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Ansible Automation Platform is available through leading hyperscalers' marketplaces, making it even easier to adopt automation across your public and hybrid cloud environments.

Where to integrate automation into your organization

Regardless of where you might be on your automation journey, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is designed to help you:

  • Accelerate
    Work faster with the power of Ansible’s massive open source community and prebuilt content collections of the most-used Ansible Roles and modules. Codify your infrastructure and share across teams and environments where you’re already running deployments, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
  • Orchestrate
    Efficiently transfer your automation into multiple domains and across different use cases and teams without slowing down development time.
  • Innovate
    ake automation even further with analytics, policy and governance, and content management. Ansible Automation Platform provides tools that make day-to-day work more efficient, helping you solve problems once and share the results with everyone.

Some of the top areas where organizations implement automation across their enterprise include:

  • Infrastructure automation
     Build, provision, and manage applications and infrastructure across public or private cloud, containers, and virtual environments, including: Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Microsoft Windows and Windows Server, other Linux operating systems, VMware Vsphere, SAP, and others. Automate your infrastructure to mitigate configuration drift and incorporate repeatability of code. Benefit from event-driven automation, which can be used to improve efficiency and responsiveness by reducing high-volume, often-repeated tasks that are part of IT operations. Consider repeatable tasks that are performed many hundreds or thousands of times across your organization as good candidates to automate–fact gathering, ticket enhancement, configuration management, and more.
  • Network automation
    Manage entire network and IT processes across physical, software-defined, and cloud-based networks. Use network automation for:
    • Configuration management. Back up and restore network devices from multiple vendors and move toward the next generation of network management by using an infrastructure as code approach to automate network operations.
    • Infrastructure awareness. Collect network facts automatically from hundreds or thousands of multivendor devices and then normalize this information to learn which devices and resources need preventative maintenance to avoid outage risks and unnecessary hardware refreshes.
    • Network validation. Examine the operational state of your network devices to check for connectivity and protocols in use, and ensure alignment with specific network compliance requirements.
    • Event-driven network management. Event-Driven Ansible connects sources of events with corresponding actions using rules. Its decision-making capabilities receive an “event” from a monitoring tool and trigger the required action. You can automatically respond to suspected security risks, manage configurations, or apply event-driven automation to the above network management tasks.
  • Cloud automation Use Ansible Automation Platform to provision instances, networks, and infrastructure with support modules that ensure deployments work across public and private clouds, whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud. Event-driven automation can then use Ansible Rulebooks to define the source of an event and explain the action to take—in the form of if-this-then-that instructions—when the event is encountered. It can help manage cloud instances, allocate or deallocate resources, update access policies, enforce governance, and more.

Read the Network automation guide to learn more.

  • Security automation 
    Orchestrate security systems using a curated collection of modules, roles, and playbooks to investigate and respond to threats. Coordinate your enterprise security systems with Ansible Automation Platform for investigation enrichment, threat hunting, and incident response. You can quickly respond to security risks before your environments are adversely impacted, or even close down a technology or solution while you investigate. As a result, event-driven automation can help you boost IT resilience.
  • Edge automation
    Using Ansible Automation Platform at edge sites takes IT automation out of the datacenter and to the edge devices and workloads that are being automated. Ansible Automation Platform always runs as the control node, allowing you to automate and speed up the configuration of points of sale, WiFi access points, networking routers, ticketing systems, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, or anything with a programmatic API or Linux operating system (OS). Event-driven automation patterns can be used to communicate with relevant systems, so corresponding tickets can be updated with rich detail to provide better root cause analysis (RCA), take an action when a device comes online, or automate a follow-on action when a condition is met.
  • End-to-end enterprise automation 
    Ansible Automation Platform unites workflow orchestration with configuration management, provisioning, and application deployment in 1 user-friendly interface, helping you deploy the platform across your organization for complete IT automation. Now with Event-Driven Ansible, there is a choice of automation modes (manually- or automatically-initiated) to help you meet a broader variety of needs.
  • Staying compliant and up to date 
    Red Hat Consulting can show you how to use automation to provide shared visibility for application, site reliability engineering, and security teams and help you integrate the role of security more holistically across your organization. Transforming how you apply automation can include identifying, assessing, and resolving risks with prescriptive analytics; defining and enforcing security and compliance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems using OpenSCAP; and supporting auditing and compliance reporting with centralized content management.

Learn more about security automation in this e-book

Given the number of places and ways you can start with automation within your organization, how do you know the best place to start?

These 4 tips can help you choose the best use case for your IT environment:

  1. Start small but think big 
    Begin with a simple use case, ideally something that needs to be repeated often but that provides value early on. Once you get your use case working, grow and expand from there, potentially advancing to something more complicated in the same domain. Over time, add more domains. Remember, implementing automation across your organization is an iterative process, not something that’s done once and then forgotten.
  2. Use, refine, learn, and expand 
    Automation is a strategic imperative, so treat it as such as you implement and automate more processes and systems.
  3. Don’t start with a broken process 
    If a process is inefficient, automating it won’t make it better. Choose a process that works but could be improved through automation.
  4. Involve your teams 
    Automation is a journey. Allow your teams to build skills and capabilities as you grow automation throughout your organization. The more that employees can see the benefits of automation over potentially perceived threats, the faster they’ll embrace it.

The benefits of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform partnerships

Red Hat has built a robust ecosystem of technology partners that provide software and other products that can support your organization.

For Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, these partners are critical, as their contributions to Red Hat Ansible Content Collections help you to get up and running on the platform faster. This precomposed content—from certified partners and Red Hat—is validated against certain versions of Ansible Automation Platform and consists of bundles of modules, plug-ins, roles, and documentation, which you can consume in a single place.

What does this mean?

You have less work to do when first finding and assembling the different roles and modules you require. Plus, Ansible Content Collections are released and maintained independently of the main product versions, allowing for a faster release cadence for content.

With an Ansible Automation Platform subscription, you have full access to Ansible automation hub, which has more than 100 certified content collections, composed of more than 40,000 modules curated for consistent and compliant delivery.

Red Hat Ansible Certified Content in the Ansible automation hub includes collections from partners, such as:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • Ansible
  • Cisco
  • Dell EMC
  • F5
  • HPE
  • IBM
  • Microsoft
  • NetApp
  • SAP
  • Splunk
  • VMWare

Red Hat works collaboratively with partners, including those who offer monitoring and observability tools, to advance event-driven automation solutions. Event-Driven Ansible begins with a certified Content Collection that often includes Event-Driven Ansible plugins and rulebooks for organizations to use. This includes partner-developed content that can help jumpstart new event-driven automation projects.

Red Hat

Ansible automation hub gives you access to more than

100

certified collections

40k

modules

Making a case for migration

You may already have Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 installed in your organization, but the time is right to migrate to Ansible Automation Platform 2.

Enhancements in Ansible Automation Platform 2 allow:

  • Ansible Automation Platform administrators to provide and manage automation execution environments to different groups, such as networking or cloud teams. Instead of addressing each individual environment separately, the teams can now access the specific content needed for their roles. This capability allows for consistency and usability across teams in your organization.
  • Users to create their own automation execution environments using the ansible-builder command-line tools.
  • Automation developers to have a consistent Ansible environment from development to production. This consistency will help them focus on the automation content itself instead of the automation environment and dependencies.
Red Hat
  • Automation teams to define, build, and update automation environments without requiring them to contact the platform administrator for changes to the platform.
  • Automation execution environments to be distributed via private automation hub, supporting consistency.

If you are already a Red Hat customer, please visit the Ansible Automation Platform 2 page in the Red Hat Customer Portal, which consolidates all of our documentation and guidance available to you.

Experts from Red Hat Consulting can help guide you through the migration process and answer any questions you might have.

If you are not a current customer, you can try Ansible Automation Platform using our 60-day trial.

Strategies for automation adoption

When it comes to people, processes, and technology, the latter is often the simplest to manage within an organization.

Technology reacts and operates as expected, and you don’t need to worry about miscommunication or uneasiness. Of course, people need the most care and attention when implementing any change into an organization, including new technology. Automation can cause particular concern for some employees, as there’s a misconception that adopting IT automation always results in a loss of jobs. In most cases, IT automation means the elevation of work, from mundane, manual tasks to more strategic and innovative opportunities.

This transition isn’t always an easy sell.

The good news is you’re not alone, and there are many resources available with strategies and tips to help you gain buy-in across your organization:

  • Learn about the ROI and other efficiency benefits that customers are realizing with Ansible Automation Platform in this IDC whitepaper.
  • Read Tales from the field: A system administrator’s guide to IT automation, a compilation of short stories that outline the excitement, frustrations, successes, and challenges of incorporating a holistic IT automation mindset into organizations and teams across the globe.
  • Discover strategies and best practices for getting buy-in for automation, from the C-suite to the IT department, in The automation architect’s handbook.
  • See how an IT executive can foster automation success in The IT executive’s guide to automation. You'll read about how to:
    • Be a champion rather than a sponsor.
    • Align to a business objective.
    • Support change and collaboration.
    • Encourage adoption by investing in people.
  • Dig into articles to read about real-world experiences of growing automation within your organization. This article, “By the numbers: Getting your team on board with IT automation,” offers some great tips and statistics.
  • Automate your public cloud resources directly from your public cloud with Ansible Automation Platform.
  • Ultimately, a team that is properly trained on automation is a successful team. Find out what type of training your team needs on Ansible Automation Platform to either get started or advance their skills. Red Hat Training and Certification offers a wide variety of options for every level of skill.
Red Hat

How to get started

Want to learn more about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?

We can help. Choose the path that’s right for you.

Download an Ansible Automation Platform 60-day trial subscription that will also include Event-Driven Ansible beginning, with version 2.4.

Connect with Red Hat Services to accelerate your time to value with a Red Hat Services Smart Start: Ansible. Work side by side with Red Hat experts as you receive a reference instance of Ansible Automation Platform, core automation content, and integration with external identity providers.

Work with Red Hat and its services partners to deploy Ansible Automation Platform solutions faster and accelerate your enterprise automation journey. Find a partner.

Get started with a free, introductory Ansible training or find your place on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform skills path. 

Talk to Red Hat Technical Account Management teams to help you take the next step in your automation journey.

Taking the next step

You know you’re ready to implement automation across your organization—before you get started, find out how well your company is poised to embrace the changes it needs.

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Are you ready to start transforming your organization with automation?