Red Hat | Ansible Automation Platform

Who uses Ansible Automation Platform?

Automation teams need to quickly provide reliable automation where and when the business needs it. In many organizations these roles may not be dedicated to a person or team, some operations team members may serve in multiple roles.

Automation architects

Automation architects elevate automation across teams to align with IT processes and streamline adoption. IT managers and architects can more easily expand automation across the enterprise, while managing automation policy and governance with automation services catalog and getting real-time reporting across the entire stack with Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform.

Automation developers

Automation developers create Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules. Developers retain the freedom to build, without the operational overhead of maintaining many tools and frameworks. Execution environments deliver a consistent container-like experience for building and scaling automation, with new tooling included to help build and manage them. There are over 100 Ansible Content Collections that offer pre-built automation content, with solutions available for nearly every use case.

Automation admins and operations teams

Automation admins and operations teams ensure the automation platform and framework are operational. Administrators and operators have powerful tools in the automation controller and automation hub to manage and share automation projects more efficiently, with a common language and broadly accessible mix of command line interfaces (CLIs), graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and text-based user interfaces (TUI) across endpoints.

Product features

Event-Driven Ansible is the newest capability of Ansible Automation Platform that enables teams to automate IT actions with user-defined, rule-based constructs. It works by receiving events from third-party tools, deciding on the actions to take, and responding automatically.

Using Event-Driven Ansible, domain experts can create end-to-end, fully automated scenarios for a broad array of use cases across the IT landscape. By automating high-volume routine tasks, teams can spend more time focusing on the work that matters most, while performing IT actions consistently and accurately at scale.

Learn more about Event-Driven Ansible

Event-Driven Ansible for architects

As part of an enterprise automation strategy, enterprise and automation architects can use a single enterprise automation framework to employ expanded automation techniques—including both manually initiated and full end-to-end automation scenarios. With the ability to automate responses to changing conditions, Event-Driven Ansible enables architects to create resilient and responsive IT solutions, which can reduce the time IT teams spend on mundane tasks.

Event-Driven Ansible for developers

Building on their knowledge of Ansible Automation Platform and YAML, developers can take advantage of Event-Driven Ansible’s flexibility across sources, rules, and actions to implement event-driven automation across a wide range of use cases. Ansible Rulebooks can work with direct execution modules or even call existing, trusted playbooks as part of its “if-this-then-that,” rule-based constructs. Ansible Content Collections—including certified collections from Red Hat and a growing list of partners—can also be used to jumpstart event-driven automation scenarios, making them even faster and easier to create. If you need to work with a specific home-grown monitoring tool, you can even create your own event source plugins.

Event-Driven Ansible for operations

IT operations teams are under constant pressure—to boost their speed of response, innovate more, increase consistency, ensure compliance and security, and decrease mean-time-to-resolution. Routine tasks often get in the way of more forward-thinking projects, meaning teams have to multi-task and work longer to accomplish it all. Event-Driven Ansible lets you automate responses to changing conditions, making it possible to improve response time, shorten outages, limit security risks, respond immediately to compliance issues, and automate fact gathering. With this automation in place, operations teams will have more time to focus on key priorities and interesting engineering challenges that can drive the business forward.

An automation execution environment is a container image which provides a defined, consistent, and portable environment for executing Ansible playbooks. This means they contain Ansible automation, Ansible content, and any additional dependencies this content requires. Automation execution environments are the base of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Many organizations don’t realize the full potential of automation because they aren’t able to scale. By using automation execution environments, you ensure that automation runs consistently across multiple platforms. All custom dependencies are defined at the development phase and are no longer tightly coupled to the control plane resulting in faster development cycles, scalability, reliability, and portability across environments.

Execution environments bring standardization to your automation efforts by lowering complexity and reducing the risk of drift between development and production. Using execution environments makes automation dependencies easier to manage for architects, automation developers, and operations teams. Automation execution environments also make automation more repeatable and globally scalable.

Learn more about automation execution environments

Automation execution environments for architects

Automation execution environments represent a change in architecture for Ansible Automation Platform. By separating the control plane and execution plane Ansible Automation Platform can provide better scalability for automation developers and administrators.This is accomplished by providing a standardized execution environment for networking or cloud teams, specific to their needs, and by providing developers with a standardized environment that frees them from worrying about dependencies.

Ansible Automation Platform can also reduce the burden on operations teams by providing self-service functionality to a number of roles. Automation teams can define, build and update their automation environments without having to contact the platform administrator for changes to the platform.

Do I need Red Hat OpenShift to run automation execution environments? No, Ansible Automation Platform supports all Red Hat platforms and can be deployed on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, or a combination of both to meet your needs and support your open hybrid cloud.

An automation execution environment contains:

Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) 8 as a base operating system
ansible-core (the core automation language)
Python 3.8
Any number of Ansible Content Collections and their dependencies (if applicable)

Keep reading about execution environments

Automation execution environments for developers

By containerizing everything you need, automation execution environments provide automation developers with a consistent development environment that’s the same as production. This allows developers to focus on the automation content itself without worrying about dependencies and drift between dev and prod. This change in architecture also enables third-party developers and partners to more easily create and distribute their own automation environments for their users and customers.

Keep reading about execution environments

Automation execution environments for operations

Automation operations team members, namely the Ansible Automation Platform administrator, can provide and manage automation execution environments to differing groups, like networking automation and cloud automation teams. Each of these groups can receive specific content to support their role instead of managing differing automation environments per individual. Members of these groups can also define, build, and update their automation environments in a self-service model without the intervention of the platform administrator.

Do I need Red Hat OpenShift to run automation execution environments? No, Ansible Automation Platform supports all Red Hat platforms and can be deployed on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, or a combination of both to meet your needs and support your open hybrid cloud.

An automation execution environment contains:

Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) 8 as a base operating system
ansible-core (the core automation language)
Python 3.8
Any number of Ansible Content Collections and their dependencies (if applicable)

Keep reading about execution environments

The automation controller is the control plane for automation, a core component of Ansible Automation Platform. Previously, the automation controller was referred to as “Ansible Tower.” The new automation controller continues to provide a standardized way to define, operate, and delegate automation across your organization while providing new functionality on an improved architecture.

With automation controller, users can manage inventory, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate those changes into reporting—all from a centralized user interface and REST API.

By standardizing how automation is initiated, delegated, audited, and deployed, automation controller allows your organization to automate with confidence and reduce automation sprawl and variance.

The automation controller now features the automation topology viewer, which allows users to graphically visualize even the most complex automation topologies—including hop, execution, hybrid, and control nodes—across multiple sites. The topology viewer gives users a clearer picture of where their automation is running, making it even easier to manage at scale with Ansible Automation Platform.

Components of automation controller include:

Task manager / scheduler
API inventory management
API credential management
API automation job management
Automation topology viewer
message/queue/cache/ KV store
Automation mesh connector
Automation mesh receptor
Database

Learn more about automation controller

Automation controller for architects

All automation team members interact with or rely on the automation controller, either directly or indirectly. By standardizing how automation is initiated, delegated, audited, and deployed, Ansible Automation Platform allows enterprises to automate with confidence and reduce automation sprawl and variance across the enterprise. Automation architects elevate automation across teams to align with IT processes and streamline adoption. Automation execution environments provide a standard way to develop and deliver automation in your organization. This decreases the complexity of your automation efforts and prevents drift between development and production.

Learn more about automation controller

Automation controller for developers

All automation team members interact with or rely on automation controller, either directly or indirectly. Automation developers create Ansible playbooks, roles, and modules that can work independently or together. Automation controller’s user interface includes distinct "view" and "edit" perspectives for controller objects and components, enabling better observability.

Learn more about automation controller

Automation controller for operations

All automation team members interact with or rely on automation controller, either directly or indirectly. Automation admins and operators ensure the automation platform and framework are operational. Their administrative tasks are aided by automation controller’s included user interface, browsable API, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications, graphical inventory management, CI/CD integrations, and workflow visualizer functions.

Learn more about automation controller

The automation mesh component of Ansible Automation Platform provides a simple and reliable framework for scaling automation. With a flexible, multi-directional communication layer, automation mesh enhances an organization’s ability to operate at a global scale. With less sensitivity to latency and connection disruption and native peering capabilities, you can reach further with enhanced reliability as compared to any other automation platform on the market today. With security features—such as TLS authentication and encryption, and additional access controls—you can rely on Ansible Automation Platform to expand the boundaries of what is possible for your entire enterprise IT estate.

With the new architectural approach deployed with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2, we need to make sure that execution environments can communicate with the controller. That’s where automation mesh comes in.

Automation mesh for architects

Architects need a solution that covers all their current requirements yet scales seamlessly to address their future needs. This solution must integrate with our current technologies and provide support and SLAs.

Previous automation architecture used isolated nodes which relied on background SSH and other protocols to establish a connection. Relying on an SSH port to be open in front of the TCP/IP can be difficult when dealing with multiple, isolated environments using multiple firewalls, multiple VPNs, etc.

Now, the automation mesh can create its own layer on top of the TCP/IP in a more secure way to connect those networks and environments. This provides more flexibility without compromising security.

Automation mesh for developers

Developers need to create automation content that can be treated as code, is portable across environments, knowing that it’ll run as intended, anywhere. Automation mesh is a physical protocol in a dedicated communication layer that we’ve customized to help the controller understand the status of an execution environment, no matter where that environment lives.

Automation mesh for operations

Operations teams need to deliver services at the ever-increasing pace of their organization. Operations teams need a platform that covers all their daily automation needs without having to understand the details of the automation foundation itself. The platform must manage dependencies and scale consistently without knowledge of ancillary tools.

An Ansible Content Collection, or a “collection” for short, is a format for organizing content independent of the main github.com/ansible/ansible development branch. An Ansible Automation Platform subscription provides access to over 100 certified content collections comprising over 40,000 modules curated for consistent and compliant delivery. Ansible Content Collections are available through automation hub.

Learn more about Ansible Content Collections

Ansible Content Collection for architects

By providing pre-built collections of automation developers can build on what already exists and operations teams can make use of existing automation to meet their organization’s needs.

Learn more about Ansible Content Collections

Ansible Content Collection for developers

Build on what has already been created in your organization and others with a collection of curated automation content. Containing over 100 certified collections (over 40,000 modules), Ansible Content Collections are available to developers through the automation hub.

Learn more about Ansible Content Collections

Ansible Content Collection for operations

Operations teams need not rely on bespoke automation with over 90 certified collections (40,000+ modules) available to them through the automation hub. Ansible Content Collections are curated to ensure consistency and compliance.

Learn more about Ansible Content Collections

Automation hub is the place to find and use supported Ansible Content Collections, which are included as part of your subscription. The collections come with content—like modules, roles, and plugins—and the documentation you’ll need to get started.

Automation hub can be accessed through the command line interface (CLI) or via console.redhat.com. Privately hosted instances of automation hub deliver support for your automation execution environments.

Who uses automation hub?

Automation hub is intended for the person that interacts with both automation developers and operations teams. Whoever is in charge of curating and distributing automation content in your organization will benefit from automation hub. This is likely an administrator or operations team, specifically a distribution engineer or release engineer. However, these roles are not necessarily dedicated to a single person or team. Many organizations assign multiple roles to people or outsource specific automation tasks.

Learn more about automation hub

Automation hub for architects

Automation hub is the automation execution environment container image repository for Ansible Automation Platform. Although it is primarily used by members of operations teams it is a destination for automation developers to publish and make their automation content available to the organization.

Learn more about automation hub

Automation hub for developers

Automation developers can collaborate and publish their automation content to a private automation hub or to the SaaS automation hub available via console.redhat.com. Developers pull a supported automated execution environment from Ansible Content Collections, tag it locally, and then push it to the automation hub.

Learn more about automation hub

Automation hub for operations

Automation hub is the automation execution environment container image repository for Ansible Automation Platform. Private, locally hosted automation hub is intended for customers running Ansible Automation Platform on physical or virtual machines. The SaaS automation hub is a container image repository serving cloud environments. Automation hub is synchronized with automation controller through a container registry credential.

Learn more about automation hub

Rich reporting and observability metrics help you track and manage your automation.

Automation analytics gives you full visibility into the performance of your automation, helping you make informed, data-driven decisions so you can scale faster. Automation analytics helps you estimate return on investment (ROI), predict the time and cost savings of future automation projects, and monitor the success or failure of jobs.

With Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you can monitor and proactively resolve infrastructure performance issues, system availability, and security vulnerabilities—helping to minimize compliance risks, threats, and potential downtime. Insights for Ansible Automation Platform relies on observability data from Red Hat support tickets and other inputs so you can identify root causes faster.

Learn more about automation analytics and Red Hat Insights

For IT leaders and automation architects

Measure your ROI and expand your automation with forecasting tools to help you predict which automation tasks will have the biggest impact on time and cost savings. Quickly identify which of your teams are using automation and the success or failure rate of those tasks.

For operations

View the most-used Ansible playbooks, jobs, or modules, and see deployment success or failure rates. Gain an intuitive, holistic view of your automation estate with detailed reports and filters to help isolate problems. Proactively monitor systems and receive triggered alerts for policy violations, security vulnerability, inactive nodes, or expiring clusters. With automation analytics and Red Hat Insights, you can detect, investigate, and resolve issues in minutes instead of hours or days.

Ansible Automation Platform provides many tools to make developing playbooks easier.

Execution environment builder - One of the tools provided to make developing playbooks easier is ansible-builder. This tool helps automation developers and administrators create automation execution environments by using the dependency information defined in Ansible Content Collections and as defined by the user. These environments create reliable and repeatable automation which can be used throughout your organization.
Automation content navigator - Automation content navigator is a utility that provides a command-line interface and text based user interface to ansible-core and execution environments. As content is being created, the user can validate their content with easy to use subcommands that will interact directly with their execution environments. This method of execution will provide direct feedback to the user in a clear text based user interface. The user will also be able to copy objects from within the user interface to utilise in other content that they could create.

Ansible content tools for architects

Execution environment builder - Since automation execution environments are the common artifact between automation developers and automation operations teams both roles should understand how to build them using the execution environment builder, ansible-builder. The execution environment builder is a command line tool (ansible-builder) which uses podman to build Ansible environments inside containers.

Automation content navigator - As content creators and consumers create content for use within the platform, they require tools and utilities that create an easy flow for them to validate that the content they are creating will work as they intend it to within the context of the automation itself and how the platform executes it.

Ansible content tools for developers

Execution environment builder - The execution environment builder, accessed from the command line interface (CLI) helps automation developers build custom automation execution environments with the precise Ansible content and dependencies needed to support their automation. These environments create reliable and repeatable automation which can be used throughout your organization.

Automation content navigator - Automation content navigator is a tool that enables users to run and validate the content they create within the context of the execution environment itself. The output of the runs they perform with ansible-navigator will be the same as how the automation controller itself will execute them.

Ansible content tools for operations

Execution environment builder - The execution environment builder is a command line tool (ansible-builder) which uses podman to build Ansible environments inside containers. With this tool operators can build automation execution environments from the command line.

Automation content navigator - The text UI provided by ansible-navigator is clear and concise, clearly displaying the results of jobs and their output. The UI allows for fine-grained interaction with the results, enabling further expansion upon content that is created before it is committed to the platform for wider execution.