Building a Center of Excellence for Ansible

As Ansible adoption grows, a challenge can arise: How do organizations track automation efforts across the entire enterprise? A common solution is to establish a Center of Excellence (CoE) for Ansible, helping organizations move from isolated automation efforts to a scalable, coordinated enterprise strategy. 

What is a Center of Excellence for Ansible?

A CoE for Ansible is a group responsible for setting automation standards and promoting Ansible’s collaborative open source nature. The CoE acts as an enablement and governance body, allowing for more effective automation across the organization.

Creating CoE for Ansible helps organizations using community Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to:

• Define automation standards and best practices.
• Share reusable automation content.
• Enable teams through training and documentation.
• Communicate updates and changes within the platform.
• Unify users and promote collaboration.

Companies often adopt a hybrid model where a small core team provides governance and architecture, while allowing the broader CoE community to contribute automation content. 

Defining key roles

A successful CoE for Ansible starts with a strong core team:

Ansible product owners lead the CoE, designating key roles to internal team members or themselves.

Automation architects define automation strategy, architectural patterns, and integration approaches.

Automation engineers develop reusable roles, collections, playbooks, and any other reference materials for other teams to adopt. 

Platform engineers manage the automation platform (server running Ansible and/or Ansible Automation Platform) and communicate updates.

Security and compliance stakeholders ensure automation aligns with organizational security policies and credential management practices.

It’s best practice to designate automation champions within the broader CoE, often corresponding to the organization’s team leads. This gives the CoE leaders a point of contact for each team using Ansible. 

Establishing standards and governance

One of the most valuable aspects of CoE for Ansible is defining clear automation standards. The CoE team can choose to enforce Ansible’s Best Practices as well as implementing their own guidelines. 

Common automation standards include:

• Playbook structure and naming conventions
• Variable and inventory management practices
• Credential management
• Documentation expectations
• Code review processes
• Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform onboarding processes
• Configuration as Code (CaC) guidelines

Automation quality can be further improved by integrating tools such as Git for version control and Ansible Lint for validating playbooks. Shared CI/CD pipelines are a great way to enforce policy and review code. 

The goal in establishing automation standards and governance is to maintain, reuse, and focus on security as adoption grows.

Building reusable automation

The CoE for Ansible is a key vessel for distributing reusable automation across the organization. When teams operate in isolation, duplicate automation efforts arise. Having a central location to host automation assets improves visibility and collaboration, avoiding overlap.

The CoE core team provides reusable content such as playbooks, roles, collections, templates, execution environments, and more. As the CoE matures, more members will contribute their automation content for reuse. 

GitHub and GitLab are recommended tools to maintain automation resources. An Ansible CoE repository can host multiple projects with varying visibility. Smaller teams typically have separate Git repositories for creating automation. Once they have a reusable automation project, they can add it to the CoE repository.

Ansible automation hub, part of Ansible Automation Platform, is another way to share roles and collections.

Growing an internal automation community

No one innovates alone. A productive CoE invests in community-building activities, such as:

• Internal training sessions and workshops.
• Automation office hours with CoE leaders.
• Collaboration channels in chat platforms (e.g., Slack, Teams, Entra).
• Contributor recognition, such as CoE Member of the Month.

These efforts create an environment where teams share ideas, learn from one another, and continuously improve their automation practices. 

Creating the Center of Excellence

The CoE core team will determine automation strategies, governance rules, and where to host content. The next step is establishing locations for shared resources, such as a Git repository. Automation engineers will add reusable automation content that is visible to CoE members. 

It is important to identify the teams and individual users using Ansible across the organization. Every team name should be tracked along with the contact information of their team lead. The core CoE team will create the Center of Excellence (e.g., an Entra group or Slack channel), and invite automation users to join. 

Recurring office hours are vital while you first establish the CoE. You should pin important links and documentation in the group channel, including instructions on how to access and contribute to shared automation.

Involvement and enthusiasm from the core CoE team will directly impact participation from the larger group.

Scaling automation with purpose

Scaling automation requires strong coordination and standards. An Ansible CoE provides the structure needed to guide that growth.

With the CoE for Ansible governance, reusable automation, and strong internal community, organizations can unlock the full potential of Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.