It takes a community: how partners play a key role in event driven automation

Event-driven automation is increasingly being adopted because of the strong benefits it delivers in managing huge amounts of complexity across multi-clouds, a multi-device remote workforce, and growing edge implementations. In a digital world, maintaining resilience and reliability is essential and event driven automation helps teams meet these needs while working around resource and skills gaps.  

This advanced automation technique can be used to address festering problems before there is a full-blown outage, improve agility and resilience to meet the demands of the business, and maintain consistency to avoid downtime and meet governance requirements. It also frees time spent on routine tasks so IT teams can focus on the innovations that matter.  

Partners benefit from enabling end-to-end event-driven automation

For independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers and service partners, this is a great opportunity to create easy-to-implement solutions for your customers and help them work with modern automation techniques that will truly make an operational impact. Event-driven technologies – including network, security, monitoring tools, observability solutions and workload optimization tools – must be cooperative players in a larger ecosystem. 

Today, we invite ISVs and consulting/service partners to create event driven automation content that makes it easy for customers to use our joint solutions. Consulting and services partners may also wish to begin discussions with customers they feel would most benefit from Event-Driven Ansible.

Why partner with Red Hat for Event-Driven Ansible? 

After its current developer preview process is completed, Event-Driven Ansible is planned to become a component of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This platform enjoys an enthusiastic community of practitioners and broad adoption by enterprises. Customers often gain remarkable hours-to-minutes benefits using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and Event-Driven Ansible could make our joint customers even more agile and responsive.  

As we emerge from the developer preview, we plan to have a core set of Event-Driven Ansible plug-ins and rulebooks for customers to leverage, including partner-developed content. We want Event-Driven Ansible to be complemented by the automation content you create, as well as the consulting services you offer.

How does Event-Driven Ansible work? 

At AnsibleFest 2022, we introduced the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview, as an automated event handling solution where the broad Ansible community will have an opportunity to try it and provide feedback.

Event-Driven Ansible is ideal for capturing a team’s technical how-to knowledge on what should be done when certain events occur, deciding when an action is appropriate, then acting to implement the specified action. Like all event driven architectures, it relies on multi-vendor solutions to analyze operations in some way, then flag and pass an event to Event-Driven Ansible for decisioning and action/remediation. 

As shown in the diagram below, Event-Driven Ansible connects sources of events with corresponding actions via rules. Its decision-making capabilities receive the “event”, match it to the appropriate Ansible Rulebook, then act using the instructions in the rulebook. You can learn more details in this intro blog.  

What are Ansible Content Collections and why do they matter? 

Ansible Content Collections is the term we use for packaged automation content (modules, plugins, Ansible roles, documentation, test scripts and more) so that customers can download and use them to jumpstart new automation projects, including those using an event driven automation model.

Join the Event-Driven Ansible community

Vendor-specific tools and even open source aggregation technologies excel at identifying the events that fall outside of the norm or expected.  Ansible builds instructions for responding to the event, deciding when those instructions should be applied, and actually applying them. Ansible Content Collections would help customers more quickly use our technologies together in their event driven solution.  

We invite you as an Ansible partner to try the developer preview and provide feedback. As the developer preview progresses, you can begin creating Ansible Content Collections for event-driven automation.  Here are some components you could include in your Collection: 

• Create a plugin for your event source
  Create source plugins that make it faster and easier for our joint customers to connect your event data to Event-Driven Ansible. This can include direct integrations or working with one of the open source integration technologies we support today, such as Kafka, webhooks and others. 
• Create Ansible Rulebooks
  Ansible Rulebooks are a key, flexible component of Event-Driven Ansible. Customers can write rulebooks describing what actions to take when an event is encountered and easily modify rulebooks as needs change. We invite partners to help customers by writing extensible rulebooks that provide a head start and make it faster for customers to create their own rulebooks.  
• Got another integration or collaboration idea? Talk to us.
  The Ansible team is open to hearing your ideas, whether in the area of messaging, integrations or another component of an event driven architecture.  Reach out to us at: ansible-partners@redhat.com.  

Contact Us

There are a range of resources you can use to start learning more about this developer preview:

• Introducing Event-Driven Ansible blog
• Web page: Event-Driven Ansible developer preview
• Event-Driven Ansible developer preview on Github
• Self-paced lab 
• Office hours monthly virtual events: November 16, 2022 and December 14, 2022
• 451 Research paper: The Impact of Event-Driven Automation