What’s new in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2.6 is now generally available, delivering new capabilities, platform enhancements, and strategic integrations to help you build resilient and trusted foundations for the next generation of IT operations, because you aren't just preparing for the future — you are automating for it. 

The 2.6 release is headlined by three new features designed to drive key outcomes for automation and IT ops teams. When you upgrade, you can expect to: 

• Unlock more value: The new automation dashboard allows you to measure the value and impact of automation initiatives.
• Operate more efficiently: The new Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant harnesses generative AI (gen AI) to provide on-demand support for a more intuitive platform experience.
• Achieve new levels of scale: With the self-service automation portal, you can quickly and easily scale automation service delivery to new users and teams.

Unlock more value: Monitor, measure, and report on the impact of your automation

With the new automation dashboard in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6, you can monitor, track, and report on the value your automation is delivering to the business. This on-premise utility provides real-time insights to help you make smarter, data-driven decisions. Customize reports to highlight time savings and ROI, then share them with key stakeholders in a more secure fashion to prove the value of your work.

Demonstrate value and measure ROI

Readily track key metrics like job success rates, time savings, and return on investment (ROI) to prove your automation's value and share successes with stakeholders.

Make smarter, data-driven decisions

Get real-time, actionable insights into your automation usage and its impact, which helps you guide IT operations and make smarter decisions based on real data.

Optimize and right-size your automation

Gain full visibility into your entire automation deployment, including both direct and indirect nodes. This helps you address over- and under-utilization, for maximizing your investment.

Report and share your data with enhanced security

The dashboard is a self-contained, on-premise utility that keeps your data within your environment, complying with existing systems security controls. You can also export reports as PDF or CSV files for easy sharing or for ingestion into your own business intelligence (BI) tools.

Operate more efficiently: Accelerate your IT operations with generative AI

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 integrates the new Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant directly into the UI. Ansible Lightspeed was first introduced as a code-generation tool, but our vision for gen AI is bigger than that. We’re seeking to infuse gen AI throughout the platform experience, in ways designed to help IT operations teams work more efficiently.

The Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant is an important first step toward fulfilling that vision. It  leverages gen AI to provide answers to questions at the fingertips of platform users, providing on-the-fly support for faster troubleshooting, onboarding, and day-to-day management of AAP. 

It also provides links to validated resources for accelerated learning, and offers flexible model connectivity with Red Hat AI. It's an integrated expert, when and where automation teams need it most. Some example prompts you might use with the intelligent assistant include: 

• What is an execution environment?
• How do I upgrade to the latest version of Ansible Automation Platform?

Achieve new levels of scale: Enable automation across the enterprise

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 introduces a new self-service automation portal that empowers IT ops teams to deliver a more streamlined experience to a broader set of users. It greatly simplifies automation service delivery with a guided, point-and-click way to launch pre-approved automation. 

Unlock wider automation adoption

By syncing your existing automation content, you extend the reach and impact of automation while maintaining control and compliance. This allows you to scale your automation efforts without the overhead of building custom solutions.

Empower admins to share automation

Admins can share automation while keeping full control and greater consistency. The portal scales without the overhead of building and managing custom solutions or integrations.

Simplify service delivery

Simplify service delivery for the entire team with a separate, user-friendly interface designed to simplify automation for domain subject matter experts without Ansible experience. It provides guided, step-by-step forms for launching automation, that are automatically generated from your existing job templates.

Self-service automation portal from two user perspectives

As a platform admin, you can define automation use cases and set access permissions. 

As a domain subject matter expert, you watch and run automation relevant to your work with an easy-to-use self-service experience.

Additional platform enhancements in AAP 2.6

In addition to new features, we've made significant enhancements to existing features to improve your experience:

Event-driven Ansible

Gain greater flexibility and control over your event-driven automation with new support for external secret management systems (like HashiCorp Vault), editable project URLs, a new label to identify jobs triggered by EDA, and enhanced Kafka support for multiple topics and wildcards.

Refreshed user interface

Navigate a cleaner, more modern, and more responsive UI that adapts to different devices and includes enhanced accessibility features. The refreshed design provides for a more fluid and consistent experience.

AI-assisted inventory generation (developer preview)

Simplify your installation and onboarding process with this new  AI feature for enhancing inventory files. You can now describe your desired topology, and the platform automatically generates a validated inventory file for you, reducing manual effort and potential errors.

Strategic integrations and new content

If you haven’t checked lately, there are a ton of valuable new collections and integrations across a range of key domains available to Ansible Automation Platform customers: 

• Networking: Arista, Cisco, Cisco Meraki, Nautobot
• Cloud: HashiCorp, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud
• Infrastructure: Windows Server, OpenShift Virtualization, VMWare
• AIOps: Red Hat AI, Splunk

Check out this blog to learn more.

Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 also ships with a number of new and improved platform management collections for more efficient configuration-as-code. You’ll also find ansible.platform enhancements aligned with the previously mentioned UX improvements, which centralize roles-based access control (RBAC) settings for all platform components via the Gateway API. 

And collections now use a standard global environment variable name and module variable across components. Automation controller, automation hub, and event-driven Ansible all use a new standard of AAP_ instead of COMPONENT_. 

The time to upgrade is now

As you plan your upgrade to Ansible Automation Platform 2.6, you can expect a more streamlined and stable experience. We have invested heavily in modern architecture improvements, made opinionated reference architectures more readily available, and significantly improved the installer. 

The bottom line? Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 customers can feel confident upgrading to 2.6 right away, in order to take advantage of a host of new features and platform enhancements, including a number of new features that were delivered in the 2.5 release. 

It's also important to remember that we are deprecating RPM-based installations after this release. First announced last September with the 2.5 release, Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 is the last release installable with RPM, and only for customers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Beginning with 2.7, we will only support containerized installations. You can find more information on this in the 2.6 release notes, and keep tabs of ongoing changes and updates on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform lifecycle page. 

Next steps and resources

As you continue to get up to speed on Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 and begin to plan your upgrade, there are a number of resources available. 

• Visit redhat.com/whats-new-aap for a deeper dive and links to key resources
• Watch the What’s new in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 video on YouTube
• Explore a hands-on interactive walkthroughs of new features
• Register for our upcoming webinar
• Check out the updated Ansible Automation Platform documentation 

Be on the lookout for more blogs in the coming month, with deeper dives on new features and expert guidance on planning your upgrade. Happy automating!