Jumpstart and expand automation across your IT operation

At Red Hat, we enjoy sharing the benefits of IT automation with you, helping you understand what is possible when you automate IT throughout an organization. Applying automation across your IT operation can free up your time so you can innovate faster, enable consistent and accurate management by teams with varying skills and improve efficiency across your operation. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables you to do more, giving you the flexibility to apply automation to your operational challenges in many different ways. Even if you already have some areas of automation in your environment, this blog will cover some techniques for expanding automation across your operation. 

Address 5 key IT operational challenges

When it comes to the challenges you have to address, here are a few of the themes that are often shared:

• You are facing complexity
  Most customers have multiple technologies in operation, a range of hybrid platforms to manage, legacy systems and applications to address, and sometimes, redundant tech stacks that are the result of mergers and acquisitions. Using automation addresses everyday tasks so your teams have more time to focus on complex operations at a more strategic level, especially when your goal is streamlined, efficient operations. This is where highly flexible automation, such as Ansible Automation Platform, comes in—to help tame the complexity
• There is an efficiency challenge
  Many customers must improve efficiency for a variety of reasons. For example, in a regulated industry, fixed consumer pricing can result in limited staffing and budget. Our customers are expected to complete an increasing amount of work with the same resources. But regardless of the industry, the quest for saving time and money is prevalent—with the goal of keeping everything running smoothly so teams can move on to the next challenge. Automation helps you do more with the same resources and can enable more focus on higher value work, such as new innovation
• Innovation is a must
  What type of innovation is top of mind for your organization? Is AI part of the solution? Automation can help you quickly complete steps across your development lifecycle, including transition from development to test to production. It can also expedite provisioning so no development team is waiting on infrastructure to complete work. It can manage the additional infrastructure that AI applications need to operate while enforcing parameters, such as Configuration as Code (CaC) or security actions— helping ensure the best outcomes from AI solutions
• There is a people challenge
  Although the discussion is often around having enough staff, a key challenge can be finding staff with specific skills. For example, site reliability engineers (SREs) must have an in-depth knowledge of your tech stack to truly understand root causes of the issues they are seeing. Sometimes you face obstacles in recruiting staff to work on specific technologies, including popular and legacy technologies. Additionally, there are morale challenges, such as motivating teams facing high compliance demands, or web or network teams who are regularly paged during off-hours to resolve issues. Applying automation to these and other people-related challenges can enable consistent and expected actions regardless of skill levels, workload demands or time of day
• Creative ideas around culture change
  Many IT decision makers understand the benefits of automation, including resilience and ROI. It’s important to show teams how automation can help them with their everyday work life, as well as introduce them to techniques that help expand the use of automation, as well as foster culture change. For example, you can appoint an automation lead and automate routine tasks, such as fact gathering for service tickets, renewing an expired certificate at 2 a.m. or manually generating inventories. As teams see how automation makes life easier, they begin to build even more automation. The Automation Architect’s Handbook provides some ideas to get started

Mission-critical automation with a highly flexible twist

For every organization, part of the journey to adopt automation is employing an automation-first mindset. As customers see the benefits of automation, it becomes a mission-critical way to operate across complex IT operations. This mindset asks users to determine if the task can be automated first, then implement such automation. One example of this is at Discover Financial Services, where Ansible Automation Platform is used as part of this initiative in IT operations. As the automation journey advances, customers are thinking about sophisticated automated actions, automating cross-domain processes (e.g., VM provisioning with storage) or orchestrating a complex process, such as an application deployment to the cloud. 

The value of Ansible Automation Platform is its flexibility. It can automate a vast array of IT needs and includes more than 170 Ansible validated content collections or Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections that serve as the building blocks to jumpstart new automation projects. Far from a pre-defined management task, Ansible Automation Platform enables you to flexibly specify tasks your automation will complete and for which technology in your operation. If your needs extend beyond these 170+ collections, you can still build the automation you need. A series of developer tools are available to create new automation—from taking advantage of generative AI for automation code suggestions to using an Ansible Content Collection as a building block to testing and to centralized portals. A private automation hub is also available with your Ansible Automation Platform subscription, enabling you to control and curate the automation jobs that are allowed to run in your environment.

When it comes to executing your automation, Ansible Automation Platform includes two capabilities that enable you to operate automation based on your needs:

• Event-Driven Ansible allows you to respond automatically to changing IT conditions. It works with third-party sources of events such as observability tools, logs and IT service management systems. When an event is received, a rulebook, which contains user-defined conditional checks, completes a decision process. When conditions are met, the specified action is taken automatically without manual intervention. Think about automated certificate renewals at 2 a.m. or automatically adding configuration data to a service ticket for faster resolution.
• Automation mesh lets you execute automation at scale—wherever you need it. You can use it to scale across on-premise environments, throughout hybrid clouds or to edge locations with central management. As you expand, automation mesh can reliably deliver and manage IT automation. You design its automation nodes—across the globe, across a domain or by your company’s units. 

These capabilities are part of your Ansible Automation Platform subscription, so it’s easy to take advantage of these capabilities as part of your automation journey.

Jumpstart new use cases

So where can you start? When designing new automation projects, we recommend a “start small, think big” approach. Find the high volume, routine tasks that keep your teams up at night or distract them from key priorities, for example automated inventory creation and service ticket enrichment. However, there are many other basic tasks you can start with as you begin your automation journey. 

You can automate any part of your IT operation, but some domains where our customers are actively automating their operations are:

• Network and edge automation. Manage your multivendor network all the way to the edge with a single automation platform. Meet network compliance needs, automate time-consuming reporting and ensure configurations follow a single source of truth model.
• Operating system automation. Whether your standard platforms are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows or something else, automation can keep them running, secure and compliant on-premise, on the cloud and at the edge. You can provision instances quickly to support development cycles and deploy applications.
• Automated cloud operations. Manage operations for and from the cloud including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Gain visibility into what is running in your cloud environment, control risk, provision new services and deploy cloud-native applications quickly. Take advantage of spending programs you may have in place with cloud providers to manage your diverse IT environment.
• Virtual infrastructure automation. Migrate virtual machines and related infrastructure consistently and at scale– and manage Day 2 operations for your virtual infrastructure. From provisioning, to maintaining security and updates, to resolving automated issues to discontinuing unused virtual infrastructure, automation can help deliver simplicity.  
• Automated application delivery, AI and more. You can automatically orchestrate all of the components required to deploy applications in a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) or DevOps workflow. As you deploy AI applications, you can manage all of this additional infrastructure to make sure applications are performant and reliable.

We have built the jumpstart automation resource page to help your team figure out how to get started with expanded automation. Review the content on the page and also share it with interested team members, but most importantly, get started today.

Jumpstart automation today

Additional resources

• The Automation Architect’s Handbook
• Five steps to defining your automation strategy
• Discover Financial services saves 800K hours with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.5
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform web page
• The Forrester Wave: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q4 2024
• Futurum: Accelerating AI, automation, and innovation in modern enterprises
• IDC Business Value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and related webinar