Ansible

It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.

I know my colleagues on the Windows side of things have felt neglected at Ansiblefest as far as sessions that help them figure out how to integrate the tool with their Windows products. Since Ansible is seen as an enterprise-wide tool, it should better support Windows platforms as well, as everything cannot always be run on Linux or a similar OS. Ansible has been great for our basic needs so far in automation. Still, we do struggle with adoption, and sometimes there are just scenarios where, as a non-developer, trying to adapt to the developed way of thinking is difficult. When i was learning Anisble, I had to learn Git and YAML together, as well as any CLI I needed, or what execution environments were. It's a lot to ramp up to and learn all at once.

Automating tasks for management of servers and deployments.

Our environment is 60% RHEL so Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good fit. Our Windows Admins are warming up to it, though they still prefer PowerShell for most tasks.

Anything you need to repeat more than twice, and anything that can normally only be done by one or two people can now be automated so others can just click Launch. It's especially nice when I can provide a non-techy person the ability to log in, and click launch to do a task that they normally needed to escalate to one or more people to get done, and now instead of them waiting, it's done instantly.

I feel that AAP can be used for any repetitive engineering or operations tasks. The initial lift can be heavy and culture can be hard to change. Once the benefits are realized, you will allow those people to move on to proactively improving their environment instead of working in a more reactionary state of mind.

In a windows world, trying to play with RHEL products

Everything from onboarding and offboarding to automating everyday tasks.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is best suited when managing hundreds or more devices/servers.

Patching has been a great use for our team. We also like to use it for building fresh virtual machines to ensure they are STIGd. We don't have a specific place where Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform seems to have issues. Most problems tend to be less tech savvy users failing to understand how to leverage the tool effectively.

It is very capable of accomplishing VM provisioning, patching maintenance, day 2 operations and app installation. It will handle multiple jobs all at once as long as your infrastructure is capable of handling the load.

It's good for managing the updates of similar systems. It's not very capable of handling the MS Office products related tasks.

Well suited for anything Ansible-related; not suitable for non-Ansible stuff ... but can be called to execute some automation from Jenkins or some other automation.
RBAC could be improved. Main system has very good support for multiple authentication methods. Installer can be flaky; does require gardening.
Needs unified authentication ... Private Hub and EDA seem to have their own authentication mechanisms.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform becomes standard for ansible-playbook executions.
Build in organizations and teams.
Support for credentials management.
Red Hat support.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited to ensure that systems are in a specific state - when it is run against those systems. More tooling in the area of periodic scanning would be helpful for compliance folks. In addition, it would be helpful to be able to import a profile to use as a baseline and derive playbooks based on those. One should not necessarily rely on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to keep a device from drifting. It is not a Tripwire that will detect and revert a change quickly. However, it could do well if used for periodic scans. Event-driven Ansible shows promise. If it is better integrated with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in terms of things like the approach to variables it could become more widely used more quickly.

We us it to trigger automated restarts of JBoss EAP instances. This has proven to make support of these servers much easier. We also use the platform to automate the build of our new EAP 8 development servers. Also for scheduled reporting and alerts.

Perfect for anything to do with Linux including configuring servers from scratch and avoiding the shell.

It is best to manage RHEL or WIndows servers for System Administrators.
It is also good for Network admins, as they can know the sate of their machine in an instant and deploy configurations to them.
Ansible works best on organization where they promote collaboration.
It might not be too good where teams are seperated, because the organization might not get full benifit only one team is using AAP, rather than the whole team.

it has been very difficult to get this thing installed on my on-premise networks and we had to disable too many required stigs to get this product approved by security

We had a set of validation scripts running on hosts before we adopt Ansible Automation Platform. Accessibility and security was a major concern. Also, the scheduling was cron-based and not flexible. Moving to Ansible help us resolve such issues/concerns.

The product is invaluable in the areas where post infra deployment configuration is required. It is not too suited for infra deployment as it is hard to maintain and remediate the state.

Ansible and AAP is well suited for orchestrating over many platforms. Its agentless architecture makes it ideal for infrastructure that cannot support an agent. It has a strong module library for the most common products, services, and platforms. It is by far the best language for anyone new to coding or automation to jump in and quickly get to a productive state. While AAP is capable of automating nearly anything, there are still advantages of using other platforms in its place. For example, Chef has been valuable for server automation because of the availability of existing cookbooks. For systems that can run an agent, having the individual nodes perform their own checks can scale a little better than the centralized model of AAP. But running an agent also means the potential risk of resource over utilization.

for confiration and server deployements it is very good to use

Based on its idempotent nature, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for the following scenarios:

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...

AAP is well suited for customers that need to automate their configuration but don't necessarily have a lot of in house expertise and would benefit from the support of Red Hat.