5 use cases for automating your infrastructure with Ansible Automation Platform

Infrastructure automation is an area where systems administrators and  IT operations teams can see some of the biggest benefits from automation, including time savings, reducing tedious manual work, and improving the overall health of their systems. In this blog, I've identified the top 5 infrastructure automation use cases for Ansible Automation Platform that you can deploy in your own environment, and I've incorporated new capabilities like Event-Driven Ansible to make managing your infrastructure even easier. 

1. Provisioning Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Ansible Automation Platform

Before you get started with any automation project, we typically recommend using automation analytics to plan and predict the potential cost savings to help prioritize which automation projects will deliver the biggest time and cost savings.  

Then you can use Ansible Automation Platform to create a workflow to build or configure a cloud or datacenter instance for RHEL, while using surveys to gather additional user input to enable further customization to meet any system requirements. You can even introduce an IT service management ticketing option, then review the job success and confirm service availability. 

Watch this video to see it in action: 

2. Managing Configuration and Drift with Ansible Automation Platform

Ongoing management tasks are a great place to focus your automation efforts to put more time back in your day so you can focus on more important tasks.  Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections can help jump start the process, with pre-built roles ready to download and run. Workflows and templates can further simplify manual steps while making the process repeatable. You can also use scheduling for cloud hygiene, while using callback provisioning to restore services quickly.

Watch now:

3. Convert from CentOS from Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Getting ready for CentOS Linux 7 end of life? Or moving from development on CentOS Stream? This third video in our series shows how easy it can be to convert from CentOs to RHEL with Ansible Automation Platform. You can create and use templates to speed up the conversion process, then run post-migration tasks to further configure RHEL servers. 

Watch the video: 

4. Linux and Windows management with Ansible Automation Platform

What if you could write a single playbook to manage both Linux and Windows services consistently? Discover the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections available for Windows, Active Directory, and Chocolatey to help ease this process. Then create a template to deploy both IIS  and Apache, while using facts to specify which tasks you want to deploy on which RHEL or Windows systems. 

See the demo on YouTube: 

5. Event-Driven Ansible using Red Hat Insights

Finally, managing compliance is notoriously difficult, but new capabilities like Event-Driven Ansible can remove some of the complexity by leveraging data sources like Red Hat Insights to make compliance detection and remediation easier and autonomous. 

First, it's important to understand the building blocks of event-driven automation: events, sources, rules, and actions. You can use the downloadable Red Hat Insights source plug-in collection to detect events within your RHEL environment such as the presence of malware or configuration drift. You can also pull in  IT service management to provide extra control and flexibility over which remediation response you want to use for each given event. 

Watch the full video:

Additional resources and next steps

Want to learn more about infrastructure automation with Ansible Automation Platform? 

• Video: Windows and Event-Driven Ansible w/ ServiceNow
• Ebook:  Automate Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Self-paced labs: Hands-on experience with ServiceNow, Event-Driven Ansible and more