What are Ansible Content Collections?

Ansible® Content Collections are a distribution format for Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform content that can include playbooks, roles, modules, and plug-ins around specific topics. 

Ansible Content Collections represent the new standard for distributing, maintaining, and using automation. It combines multiple types of Ansible Automation Platform content, improving flexibility and scalability.

Collections are designed with a consistent format that allows content creators to ship bundles of modules, plug-ins, roles, and documentation together—and for users to use these pieces in a single place. 

Ansible Content Collections help Ansible Automation Platform users automate faster with precomposed content from Red Hat and our certified partners.

These collections are sorted by content domain and require less upfront work to find and assemble different roles and modules.

Traditionally, module creators have had to wait for their modules to be marked for inclusion in an upcoming Ansible release or had to add them to roles—making content use and management more difficult.

Ansible Content Collections are released and maintained separately from main product releases, so feature updates and new content can be released more often.

Content collections are developed to work with certain versions of Ansible Automation Platform. 

By shipping components like modules, roles, plug-ins, or playbooks within Ansible Content Collections along with pertinent documentation, automation content creators can move as fast as the demand for automation. As a result, updated content is continuously available to automation users. . 

For example, a public cloud provider can now introduce new services along with the ability to automate them without waiting on the modules to be accepted by the entire Ansible community.

Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections focus on how to integrate with Red Hat and our partner platforms (typically in the form of modules, roles, playbooks, plug-ins, and/or documentation). Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections are fully supported by Red Hat. 

Ansible validated content offers expert guidance for how to perform operations or tasks in a Red Hat or partner platform (typically in the form of roles and documentation). Some validated content may refer to a Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection to simplify the use of the collection. Ansible validated content is curated and tested by Red Hat to work in production with Ansible Automation Platform. Because it is customizable, it is not supported by Red Hat. 

Ansible community content is created by the Ansible user community and may assist with either integration with platforms or offer guidance on performing operations and tasks in those platforms. Community content resides in galaxy.ansible.com. It is not supported or tested by Red Hat.

Ansible automation hub is the official location to discover and download certified Ansible Content Collections from Red Hat and Red Hat’s technology partners. Full information about collections officially maintained by Red Hat can be found in this Knowledgebase article.

Beginning with the release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.3, you can directly access Ansible validated content through private automation hub. 

Access to Ansible automation hub and private automation hub are included with an Ansible Automation Platform subscription, and features more than 135 certified content collections from over 60 industry-leading partners.

Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections can be published to Ansible automation hub. They provide direct-to-user automation for integrations with Ansible Automation Platform.

The content collections you create can be shared with others in your organization through private automation hub.

Private automation hub gives developers the ability to collaborate and publish their own content and streamline sharing and delivery throughout the organization. It also supports automation execution environments, so you can build and share container images with defined, consistent, and portable environments to execute your automation. 

While organization-specific content collections can be published to private automation hub, community-contributed collections can be uploaded to Ansible Galaxy to share within the broader Ansible automation community.

When implementing automation across the enterprise, IT organizations need a standardized way to define and embed automation workflows into other tools and processes. They also need reliable and scalable execution of automation and a centralized system that enables auditing.  

By standardizing how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, Ansible Automation Platform allows you to automate with confidence and reduce inconsistencies across the enterprise. An Ansible Automation Platform subscription delivers certified content from our robust partner ecosystem, access to hosted management services, life cycle technical support, and expert knowledge gained from our success with thousands of customers.

And because it is based on an intuitive automation language, Ansible Automation Platform allows users to coordinate between multiple teams and individuals to share, review, and manage automation content. Teams can start implementing and sharing automation faster with Ansible Content Collections precomposed content.