Overview
What is Ansible?
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments…
AAP Review.
Best option to deploy and maintain infrastructure.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Public Sector Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Ansibalize me
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform review
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform review
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform management
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is the best!
AAP Helped Us Become a Culture of Automation
Ansible is Awesome!
Just okay
Going Well So far!!
AAP from summit.
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Parallel Execution (40)8.989%
- Infrastructure Automation (44)8.888%
- Automated Provisioning (41)8.585%
- Reporting & Logging (41)7.575%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Video Reviews
3 videos
Pricing
Basic Tower
5,000
Enterprise Tower
10,000
Premium Tower
14,000
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
WebLogic Continuous Deployment with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Trusted Automation Series: F5 BigIP
Manage your Cisco devices with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Network Automation Basics - First Ansible Playbook
Deep Dive - Automated NetOps - Ansible for Network GitOps
Features
Configuration Management
Tools and features offered by configuration management software.
- 8.8Infrastructure Automation(44) Ratings
Automate the setup of systems to achieve their desired state using configuration files.
- 8.5Automated Provisioning(41) Ratings
Automatically and systematically deploy, configure, and manage IT infrastructure and resources.
- 8.9Parallel Execution(40) Ratings
Allows for the simultaneous execution of configuration changes across multiple nodes or components.
- 8Node Management(32) Ratings
Allows for the administration and oversight of individual devices or systems within a network.
- 7.5Reporting & Logging(41) Ratings
Generate reports and logs to track changes made to configurations, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing.
- 8.7Version Control(38) Ratings
Track changes made to configurations over time. Allowing for rollback to previous configurations if needed.
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Ansible?
Its Automation Hub provides a one-stop-shop for Ansible content that is backed by support from Red Hat and its partners to deliver additional reassurance for demanding environments.
The Ansible project and Ansible Engine are open source technologies. The Ansible project is built by the community (ansible.com/community) for the benefit of the community. Ansible Engine is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an enterprise IT platform.
Ansible Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Linux |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(327)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-21 of 21)AAP Review.
- Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
- Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
- Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
- Ansible doesn't parse data well in some formats. You have to make your inputs pretty before they get to Ansible. WIth our other tools, we can take junk inputs and turn it into usable variables, etc.
- Training is very expensive, and our company opted not to do it. Instead, we used classes from Udemy or Cloud Guru. I don't see why Redhat couldn't offer cheaper hands-on training options like that. I would also like to see included in these training classes more focus on writing YAML effectively and to Ansible Lint or codebot standards rather than relying on Lint and Codebot to help fix people's code. I think this also slows the adoption of the product within companies, as without training, many people will stop using the product until they are sure they have the time and bandwidth to learn it. With training, they are given that time and instruction.
- There should be clearer documentation around building modules for the HUB. I struggled greatly with the initial folder structure and the requirements of documents like READMEs and requirements.yml files, etc.
- Using containers to develop allows migration to production to be extremely reliable.
- Allows RBAC to pass automation capabilities to multiple teams.
- Execution environments can be a hard to understand and get started with customization. The documentation could use some examples of building the container or perhaps a youtube video series with a detailed run down.
- The output streaming is very buggy.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform review
- Repeat
- Be consistent
- Take a load of my plate
- Users and teams, basically the entire access portion
- More survey options
- The ability to map external Auth groups to internal teams
Why you should use Ansible.
- Documentation is great.
- Onboarding and offboarding servers.
- Patching
- Ability to search extra vars in job templates.
- Expanded powershell module.
Great for automating your automation
- GUI for Ansible Playbooks
- Scheduling
- Auditing (seeing what playbooks others have ran and when)
- Advanced workflows
- Dynamic Surveys
If you use Ansible you should use Red Hat AAP
- Automation
- Configuration Integrity
- Job detail refresh in web interface
- UI improvements (a bit clunky)
We are looking forward to using the new Event Driven Ansible
Ansible... It is the way
1.) Manual and repetitive tasks: Ansible Automation Platform helps eliminate manual, repetitive tasks by automating them. This reduces human error, increases efficiency, and allows IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
2.) Configuration management: Managing configurations across a large number of systems can be challenging. Ansible Automation Platform enables centralized management of configurations, ensuring consistency and compliance across the infrastructure.
3.) Application deployment and orchestration: Deploying and managing applications across different environments can be time-consuming and error-prone. Ansible Automation Platform simplifies application deployment and provides orchestration capabilities to streamline the process.
4.) Infrastructure provisioning: Provisioning and managing infrastructure resources can be complex, especially in cloud or hybrid environments. Ansible Automation Platform helps automate infrastructure provisioning, enabling organizations to scale resources efficiently and consistently.
- Configuration management at scale
- Infrastructure as code
- Cross-platform and cross-environment compatibility
- Managing systems off corporate network; i.e. company provided equipment.
- Think windows MDM... how do we manage systems off of corporate network.
1.) Configuration management: Ansible excels in managing and maintaining consistent configurations across a large number of systems. Whether it's configuring software, network devices, or infrastructure components, Ansible's idempotent operations ensure that desired states are achieved and maintained, even in complex environments.
2.) Continuous deployment and integration (CI/CD): Ansible is well suited for automating application deployment and orchestrating CI/CD pipelines. Its idempotent execution ensures consistent and reproducible deployments, making it easier to roll out updates, manage multiple environments, and integrate with popular CI/CD tools.
3.) Infrastructure provisioning and orchestration: Ansible is an excellent choice for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources. Its idempotent playbooks enable organizations to automate the creation and configuration of servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud resources, allowing for scalable and consistent infrastructure provisioning.
4.) System administration and operations: Ansible's idempotent nature makes it ideal for system administration tasks and operational automation. Whether it's managing user accounts, updating software packages, or performing routine maintenance tasks, Ansible ensures that operations are executed reliably and consistently across different systems and environments.
Ansible is the way...
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for Patching
- Patching
- Software Deployment
- Change across the board in no time
- Documentation
- Ease of integration with other products such as VMware
Automate This
- easy to read and understand code
- essentially documents the environment
- doesn't require an agent
- inventory in AAP
- blue green deployments from AAP
- documentation has a lot of room for improvement
- Github integration using projects to tie code versions to templates
- running the same automation code across one to many hosts
- being able to automate almost anything, running powershell, terraform, python inside of Ansible plays.
- Job template workflow decisions to do more than failed/success/all
- RBAC for users, teams and orgs sometimes has differences in access roles.
- better error handling/retries on connection problems, which typically force fail a play before code can execute
This allowed a predefined configuration of Ubuntu hosts while resetting those after every lab assessment.
- Easy to learn
- Enables GitOps
- More productivity due to time saved by automation
- Inventory definition not intuitive
But also for granular automation it can be used.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automation can serve as a form of documentation.
There is almost no scenario where Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform makes no sense to use at all.
Not owner, but happy user !
- Provisioning of servers on hypervisiors
- Configuration of software through API
- Event driven remediation
- Automation hub stuck when pulling images
- Documentation on deploying isolated nodes
Automate the Automation using Ansible
Ansible helps us out ensures the setup we have done should remain exactly the same every time we bring the tool up. Also, we manage a couple of our application deployments for technologies like Python & Nodejs using Ansible
- Modules to Automate Configuration
- Distributed Inventory & Ansible Configuration Management
- Error Handling
- There Shell module needs more improvement
- Documentation examples and actual usage are different for new users it might be difficult to start
Ansible - simple and powerful configuration management
- Simple implementation by using readable yaml playbooks.
- Natively has many modules that integrate with various software and technologies.
- There are still some modules that should be native but are not (MSSQL, Vault, etc).
- Creating extensive logic in the playbooks is not as straightforward as other scripting languages.
- Playbooks double as documentation of server environments.
- Makes it easy for developers to deploy.
- Automates the deployment process.
- Some of the modules could use more features.
Ansible-- Chef has been outcooked
- Automating any machine-level processes that you need to do to set up an environment.
- Great for sending out consistent changes to a group of servers.
- Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
- There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.
Ansible - great for simple configurations
- Installing and configuring software on instances.
- Lightweight footprint. No agent required.
- Predictable execution. Generally, the playbooks are run top to bottom.
- Scheduling is not included in the OSS product, requires a purchase of Ansible Tower.
- Relies solely on a reliable SSH connection.
- No protection against concurrent playbook runs.
Quick, Fast, and Easy
- Simple, low-overhead configuration and management for servers or laptops.
- Easy to configure and set up, yet powerful in its configuration options.
- Excellent documentation for the options available.
- A simpler way to keep a large number of hosts under management and ensure that they are kept in sync.
- Improved speed. Some runs can be fairly slow.
Ansible - simple, clean, up and running in minutes.
We also use it to provision disposable local development environments that identically match production environments.
- Ansible is extremely easy to use when compared to other CM tools. Developers new to Ansible can get up and running in very little time. This is nice, in that we can have a few people on each team that know Ansible well, but the other devs can all contribute.
- Ansible is agent-less, so setup is much quicker...the code all lives and is executed from one place.
- Ansible plays well with immutable architecture. It's every bit as easy to create a new server and destroy the old one as it is to update the old one.
- Yaml for configurations is an excellent choice.
- Tooling and documentation is growing now that it's not super-new anymore, but this was an issue for a while, primarily because the other main CM tools had simply been around longer.
- Large-scale use cases might benefit more from a CM tool with an agent.
- Jinja templates are used - many don't like this.
Well suited for immutable infrastructure.
Not as well suited for large-scale infrastructure.
- Imperative orchestration works well. There is no resource ordination issues like there can be with Puppet or Chef.
- It is easy to get started and start iterating on plays, books, roles.
- The docker and rax resources are very robust and compelling. I hope these continue to develop and flourish.
- There are conflicting stories on how best to organize a role's structure. Old documentation exists, and as Ansible has grown directions have pivoted a bit. This should be trued up.
- Pull-based Ansible is a compelling use case. Ansible should come up with a pattern which supports this configuration.
- How to integrate ServerSpec infrastructure integration testing is sorely lacking. Ansible should curate practices and docs around this.
It's like the diet version of Chef
- It is very lightweight so it is great for running simple repetitive tasks such as restarting services, copying files, or running simple shell commands.
- Ansible is fantastic for deploying servers in a cloud environment. The modules are very simple and easy to understand and deploying server images is surprisingly fast.
- Ansible provides phenomenal documentation and has a very supportive community that works diligently to make modules as lightweight as possible without removing functionality.
- Ansible is still in it's infancy as an open source automation tool compared to some of the more well-known competitors. This does lead to needing to create custom modules or utilizing some modules outside of their normal intended use to perform tasks.
- Since Ansible runs each task individually over SSH, if you have a playbook with a large number of tasks to perform it can be a lengthier process due to some significant wait time between tasks. A simple solution is obviously to eliminate as many of these tasks as possible or break them up into separate play books.