Innovate with automation

Southwest Airlines completes more than 4,000 flights each day from 120 airports in 11 countries. Operating at this scale of business requires a sturdy and reliable network infrastructure that can keep pace with internal team and customer needs. To support its IT network and mitigate outages, Southwest decided to implement a new automation solution. 

Automation network engineering

Keeping Southwest’s network running smoothly is the core mission of ​its network engineers. They manage approximately 5,000 network devices across multiple vendors, including switches, Cisco routers, Palo Alto firewalls, and F5 LTM and GTM load balancers, with each airport using 25-100 devices. Adopting Ansible Automation Platform has helped Southwest address the complexity of this multivendor infrastructure. 

“Our airports need access to all their applications, so our staff can get gates ticketed and customers on the plane,” said Carlos Tapia, Senior Systems Engineer, Southwest Airlines.

With so many devices in use at more than 100 airports, avoiding network configuration drift became a challenge—and Southwest’s engineers only had short times between flights to complete maintenance. They would often implement changes in the very early morning, then spend hours documenting these changes.

Southwest began exploring how an automated change process could create a ticket, schedule tasks, complete implementation, and promptly close the ticket—without manual effort by its network engineers. 

The airline’s initial automation use case focused on network access control (NAC), including protection from unauthorized external devices obtaining an IP address and connecting to Southwest’s network. Its network team used Ansible Automation Platform to build and test configurations for a variety of NAC use cases, then deploy them to all switches.

More recently, Southwest used Ansible Automation Platform to help deploy airport networks at the speed of demand. Because Southwest uses at least 10 switch models, each with multiple firmware versions, completing updates manually was complex and time consuming. A standardized, preconfigured network setup now provides 90% of the components at each airport. An Ansible Playbook sets up the core switch and router functions before Southwest’s network engineers configure airport-specific requirements. For updates, a playbook automatically determines the correct software version the switch model needs, then downloads the firmware, performs validation, and completes the update. 

Not only does this approach ensure that the airline’s networks are more reliable, it also saves significant time. At least 30 minutes was needed to configure a single device, depending on the size of the airport. With automated setup, the end-to-end process takes about 20 minutes.

Southwest’s playbooks are written using Ansible Roles to organize tasks, templates, files, and variables. They follow the YAML approach for directory layout, use Jinja2 templating to format text, and integrate with GitLab to establish a single source of truth. 

Saving time while improving scalability

Southwest has saved significant time with its new automation approach based on Ansible Automation Platform. In its NAC use case, network engineers previously needed 8-12 months to build, test, and deploy configurations to all switches. Now, by using automation they only need 6 weeks to complete the same tasks.

When manually updating the airline’s Cisco IOS networking software, network engineers could typically only modify 10 devices during the overnight maintenance window. Now, one of the airline’s biggest playbooks manages these upgrades, and they can be completed on at least 100 devices during the same window.

Mitigating risk of outages

Ansible Automation Platform has also played a pivotal role in helping Southwest’s network engineers avoid configuration drift when setting up new switches. Before automation, an engineer would rely on configuration documentation to set up the switch. But if another engineer had updated a switch of the same type without reflecting the updates in the documentation, configuration drift would occur. 

Network engineers now use playbooks, accessed via a Southwest Airline’s web portal, to configure new switches. The standardized configurations remove the potential for human error that can cause drift, which can result in network outages. 

Before, if essential systems were to go down, engineers wouldn’t be able to manually check all devices, the firewall, and the Domain Name System (DNS) quickly enough to avoid a major outage. Now, Ansible Automation Platform launches 100 playbooks concurrently to access all of the information needed to identify any network issues and their location, helping Southwest resolve this type of downtime in less time.

Unburdening engineers to innovate and expand use cases

With automation now running previously manual, time-consuming processes, Southwest’s networking engineers can focus on larger, more complex projects—including optimizing Southwest’s routing environment—and spend more time innovating. 

To build on its success using automation, the airline is considering other areas where Ansible Automation Platform can be used, such as firewalls and a software-defined wide-area network (WAN). But its end goal is to implement an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) model, with a GitLab source. Using this approach, network engineers would make changes once in GitLab, then listeners would check where updates are needed, schedule the changes, and implement and validate them within the maintenance window—a hands-off approach that could expand to all network devices, platforms, and environments.

“We want to get more of our engineers into the automation mindset,” said Tapia. “[Automation coding assistant (formerly Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed)] can help them understand how to structure a playbook. I’m also planning to use it to onboard network devices from a new vendor or if we expand into the cloud. It would give me a framework for the new playbooks,” he added.

Read the full Southwest Airlines customer success story.

More than 28 million customers bank with TD Bank (goes by TD) across North America, where the company operates around 2,200 branches and campuses. To deliver uninterrupted, always-on services, the bank requires strict operational consistency across its technology infrastructure. Managing a vast network of around 10,000 devices with disconnected automation tools and accumulated technical debt made changing infrastructure a slow, complicated process, where even a minor misconfiguration could disrupt branch services or customer transactions. TD decided to seek a way to reduce network management time and manual effort without compromising system stability or customer trust.

Standardizing network automation on a unified platform

To overcome these challenges, TD standardized on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as the foundation for a centralized network automation strategy. The bank selected Red Hat’s platform for its agentless architecture, vendor-agnostic flexibility, and network-wide visibility and control. Scaling methodically, the network team developed reusable playbooks, execution environments, and automated workflows to support branch provisioning, migrations, updates, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployments. To date, the team has built more than 100 playbooks and generated 20,000 pieces of change documentation, using a scalable framework that grows more effective with every iteration.

Delivering upgrades faster to improve developer schedules

End-to-end standardized automation has helped TD drastically reduce turnaround times for complex technology provisioning and network upgrades. These tasks previously took months, but are now completed in days, with predictable outcomes. Other automated, routine tasks, such as operating system and firmware upgrades, port enablement, and Internet Protocol (IP) updates, let the team execute large changes in parallel. As a result, TD has eliminated repetitive overnight shifts and manual documentation for engineers, fostering better work-life balance and time to focus on creating innovative solutions to business challenges.

Preparing for future development capabilities

TD is now incorporating AI copilots and custom agents into its pipeline to handle repetitive coding and quality assurance tasks in less time without expanding headcount. The bank’s team continues to work closely with Red Hat to support ongoing refinement and prepare for future adoption of self-service and AI-based capabilities.

Read more about how TD reduces provisioning from months to days with scalable network automation.

Xylem is a Fortune 500 global water solutions provider that helps customers and communities build a more water-secure world. The company's software division supports an internally hosted application, Regional Network Interface (RNI), that is used by utility companies to manage water meters across municipalities. RNI instances are custom-built on virtual machines (VMs) in a private datacenter.

Previously, operational processes at Xylem such as security scans, reporting, and environment cleanup were handled manually and supported a command-line interface (CLI). This lifecycle frequently required several weeks per deployment and increased the risk of errors. To establish consistent, efficient operations at scale, Xylem sought to maximize its use of automation across its datacenter processes.

Embracing intelligent automation and event-driven orchestration

Xylem integrated Ansible Automation Platform into its private datacenter to unify security features, integration, and flexibility on a single platform. To build confidence among datacenter teams new to automation, the Group Information Systems team used the platform's presentation layer, audit trails, and workflow diagrams to provide visibility into every stage of execution.

As part of this deployment, Xylem implemented Event-Driven Ansible—a feature built into Ansible Automation Platform—to manage and automate its time-consuming security scans. Now, when a user opens a Jira ticket, this feature receives it via a webhook and initiates an application programming interface (API) call to automatically execute the playbook and notify users.

The company’s team built safeguards directly into its playbooks to maintain strict operational control using:

• Conditional execution: Specific conditions must be met to trigger each subsequent step, preventing accidental bulk execution.
• Role-based governance: If a scan finds vulnerabilities, the security team is notified, but only the specific engineer assigned to the ticket can trigger a rescan.
• Simplified tracking: When vulnerabilities are resolved, adding a comment to the ticket automatically instructs the VM to rescan.

Standardizing backup and storage

Xylem’s storage team standardized workflows by replacing manual processes with repeatable, modular templates. For example, the backup team automated previously manual reporting using playbooks that took just 6 hours total to write. These playbooks save them an hour per week on the creation of the main backup report and deliver automated health-check reports either daily or every 4 hours if an error occurs, saving around 2 work hours per day.

Expanding automation from managing VMsto provisioning, storage, networking, and ongoing maintenance workflows has also helped the company reduce time to complete overall back-end processes by 25% or more—while ensuring configurations are applied consistently across development and operations teams.

Eliminating outages and reducing operational costs

Automating manual processes has helped Xylem significantly reduce operational costs while speeding application provisioning for utility customers. In high-volume use cases, such as storage reclamation, deployment of Ansible Playbook-based templates has saved more than 40 hours of manual labor to date. More importantly, substituting manual CLI execution with automated playbooks has successfully eliminated costly service outages and ensured stable and resilient back-end operations. Xylem is currently expanding this framework to support auto-remediation for common infrastructure alerts from monitoring VMs, central processing units (CPUs), and discs to resolve issues before they disrupt production systems’ stability.

Improving engineer satisfaction and innovation

Repetitive, manual tasks and reactive troubleshooting can monopolize the time of technical personnel. By deploying Ansible Automation Platform to handle these tasks, Xylem has successfully reduced unexpected overtime and improved the work-life balance of its private datacenter team. These highly qualified technicians can focus on strategic initiatives and innovative activities that deliver more business value. Cultivating a more satisfying work environment has ultimately helped Xylem recruit and retain skilled technical talent.

Adopting an automation-first mindset

Xylem’s early success with Ansible Automation Platform has initiated a powerful, organization-wide culture shift to an automation-first mindset. Engineers now ensure that evaluation of any new technology includes its automation capabilities.

In the future, Xylem plans to expand its automation strategy to other highly complex systems, such as automating patching to unify 6 disparate approaches into a single, standardized workflow and automating its disaster recovery processes, ensuring rapid recovery and continuous water service management for municipalities worldwide.

Read the full Xylem case study.

When Mapfre Insurance, a global insurance company headquartered in Madrid, created its cloud strategy, the company quickly realized automation was needed to achieve its goals: entering new markets faster, reducing infrastructure costs, reducing its carbon footprint, and maintaining resilience and security. To achieve these goals, Mapfre adopted Ansible Automation Platform to automate key processes.

Addressing business priorities

These processes support 3 key metrics:⁶

1. Time to market: Previously, delivering a new feature to market took 6 months—including 15 days to create a cloud environment and 3 weeks to onboard a developer. By adopting Ansible Automation Platform, Mapfre reduced lead time for new features by 55%, saved 4,700 developer hours, and reduced error rates by 85%.
2. Cost and sustainability: Mapfre used Ansible Automation Platform to automate shutdown of unused preproduction environments after 30 days and deleting orphaned resources.
3. Resilience and security: Automating remediation processes, disaster recovery environments, and disconnection of at-risk environments has helped Mapfre reduce related error rates.

Expanding automation

Now Mapfre realizes that automation is a critical component to its success. The company plans to use Event-Driven Ansible, a built-in feature of Ansible Automation Platform, and a Policy as Code (PaC) approach to support a stronger focus on security, continue reducing error rates, and enhance its customer experience.

Watch MAPFRE’s testimonial video. 

As a global managed service provider, Ensono offers a wide range of infrastructure solutions, from IBM mainframes to public cloud environments, and enterprise clients. But with a complex technology architecture and evolving client expectations, the company needed a unified approach to automation. Ensono had implemented various ad hoc automation solutions, but saw an opportunity to increase coordination and strategic oversight with a central solution that could scale with customer demand across its hybrid cloud environment.

Progressing from isolated scripts to a strategic platform

Ensono migrated from the community project AWX to Ansible Automation Platform, deployed on Red Hat OpenShift, to transform how the company delivers services and supports its clients and engineers.

Using Red Hat professional services helped Ensono complete the implementation of Ansible Automation Platform in less time and in line with industry best practices. “Red Hat Consulting helped us consolidate decades of experience into a cohesive, production-ready deployment. We were able to launch Ansible Automation Platform in just 4 and a half months,”said Nathan Yelton, Infrastructure Lead, Ansible & Integration at Ensono.

Gaining consistency and confidence with Red Hat OpenShift

Ensono deployed Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat OpenShift to take advantage of end-to-end support, streamlined lifecycle management, and GitOps-based deployments. Deploying on Red Hat OpenShift simplifies patching, security updates, and upgrades. “We can roll out changes with zero disruption to users, and our clients never know we’re updating in the background,” said Yelton.

Enhancing cross-team collaboration

Red Hat consultants also helped Ensono launch a company-wide automation Community of Practice (CoP) to encourage cross-functional collaboration. Engineers from networking, mainframe, open systems, and hyperscale teams now work together on the shared Ansible platform. Automation is no longer just a tool–it’s engrained in the company’s culture. “We’ve created a safe space for engineers to learn, share, and develop automation that directly benefits our clients,” said Yelton.

Ensono’s developers now use automation coding assistant (formerly Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed) and Event-Driven Ansible, a built-in feature, to support new users and advanced use cases. “The automation coding assistant gives our engineers an AI-powered coding assistant, which is especially helpful for our people who don’t write playbooks every day,” said Yelton. In addition, the team uses Event-Driven Ansible to build and push proofs of concept to production in a single day.

Scaling time and financial savings

In just 1 year, Ensono has saved more than 210,000 engineering hours and executed more than 40 million automation tasks using Ansible Automation Platform. “My favorite moment was realizing our platform was running more than 1 automation action per second on average,” said Yelton. That means it’s consistently delivering real-time value—helping clients operate more efficiently—at scale.

The ability to track and communicate these results to senior leadership has added to the positive view of this new automation approach company-wide. “We didn’t realize how powerful our automation was until we saw it in action and reviewed the data. “Now, our leadership uses it to guide decisions, forecast growth, and identify new opportunities,” said Yelton.

Improving the customer experience

Automation has also improved service delivery for Ensono’s clients in several ways, from faster ticket resolution and useful alerts to fully automated remediation. For example, automatically restarting mainframe jobs has reduced downtime from 30 minutes to 2.5 minutes, ensuring critical business services remain available.

Exploring opportunities for new benefits

Ensono continues to seek opportunities to expand its automation capabilities, including exploring OpenShift Virtualization, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift that integrates VMs into modern hybrid cloud infrastructure for improved management and large migrations.

Yelton and his team envision how AI and automation could work together to further reduce complexity and increase agility for both clients and its engineers. “Automation and AI are here to augment people, and we’re just getting started,” said Yelton.

Read the Ensono press release.