Review of Ansible Automation Platform and hopes for the future!
We started with Tower for automated OS updates and configurations. We have since moved to using configuration as code and Ansible …
Starting at $5,000 per year
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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…
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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
Senior DevOps Architect and Developer
University of Texas at Austin (Education Management, 5001-10,000 employees)
Video Reviews
3 videos
Is it worth it? | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
04:14
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Words from an Automation Architect
03:12
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Systems Admin Thoughts
06:37
Pricing
Basic Tower
5,000
On Premise
per year
Enterprise Tower
10,000
On Premise
per year
Premium Tower
14,000
On Premise
per year
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
YouTube
Trusted Automation Series: F5 BigIP
YouTube
Manage your Cisco devices with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
YouTube
Network Automation Basics - First Ansible Playbook
YouTube
Deep Dive - Automated NetOps - Ansible for Network GitOps
YouTube
Features
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Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
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.
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
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 and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
Reviewers rate Parallel Execution highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of Ansible are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Reviews
(1-25 of 109)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Repeating tasks based on a schedule.
- Agnostic support for so many platforms and systems.
- Support for federated environments, and custom use cases.
- Using standard and open developments environments (Python and JSON).
- Playbook execution result output can sometimes be very messy and hard to understand. Make JSON output pretty and understandable. Allow disclosure triangles to hide/show content and let the playbook dictate that.
- Allow for a pop-up review of a playbook's credentials, inventory, or other sub-components instead of forcing a new window or tab within the browser. Allow for quick review or audit.
- Allow for stepping through a playbook, step by step, just like a development IDE or programming environment, inspecting variables and output from plays.
May 10, 2024
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.
- Consistency
- Speed
- Accuracy
- None that I can think of at this moment.
May 10, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
- Bootstrapping servers
- Configuration management
- Security software updates
- Reporting inventory
- Connectivity for Windows servers
- 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.
May 10, 2024
Ansibalize me
- Idempotency
- Repeatability
- Anyone can run deployments with minimal training or skills
- More modules built into core for disconnected environments
May 10, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform review
- Allow us to create playbooks eliminating the mindless day to day tasks
- Make changes through automation to keep or environment secure
- Allows collaboration between teams on projects
- It has been a steep learning curve for some
May 10, 2024
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
May 10, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform management
- Reduce times
- Reduce costs
- Activities more quickly
- Security
- Flexibility
- Infrastructure
- Cyber security
- Development
May 10, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is the best!
- Event Driven Automation
- Disaster recovery
- Repeatable playbooks written in human readable language
- Better information on use cases
- Quick starts for customers new to ansible
- More robust demos in RHPDS
May 09, 2024
AAP Helped Us Become a Culture of Automation
- Streamlining software package installation
- Detailed information while playbooks are running
- Ease of use allows us to chain modules into larger playbooks quickly and easily
- Examples of some loops could be more thorough
- Some errors need a decoder ring to sort out
May 09, 2024
Ansible is Awesome!
- Workflows
- Ease of use
- Job templates that enable experts to focus on other tasks rather than training.
- Updating projects can be cumbersone.
- Inventory management.
- Activity dashboard could use improvement.
May 09, 2024
Just okay
May 09, 2024
Going Well So far!!
- It's nice that it integrates with so much
- The ability to use VS Code is really nice and the integration is great.
- I like that it's built on open source.
- YML is a pain in the butt but I know this is a standard
- I would like to see integration with Foglight for our database alerts and triage
May 09, 2024
AAP from summit.
- Easy to use.
- Code is reliable and repeatable.
- I can give people playbooks and not worry that they won’t use it correctly.
- More vault integrations.
- Passing variables between workflows.
- Auto saving workflow visualized before leaving the page.
May 09, 2024
check it
- speed
- ease of use
- standardize our community
- vaulting
- standard playbooks
May 09, 2024
Ansible is the best
- fast
- auto
- every thing looks perfect
- create platform
- clear to use
May 09, 2024
Why you should use Ansible.
- Documentation is great.
- Onboarding and offboarding servers.
- Patching
- Ability to search extra vars in job templates.
- Expanded powershell module.
May 09, 2024
Hustle
- System management
- Auditing
- Rbac
- I have note been limited yet
- Reliable
- Scheduling of Tasks and Jobs
- API
- UI Improvements
- Cleanup
- Subscription Count/Inventory Calculation
May 09, 2024
AAP review
- Schedule jobs for execution.
- Giving real-time job output.
- Finding jobs, templates, hosts, and other items.
- Consolidating metrics on jobs executed against a templated.
- Searching the job output while the job is running.
- No summary on cancelled jobs.
May 08, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
- Scales extremely well
- Integrates with a lot of tools/technologies
- Flexible
- Error messaging can be better, sometimes it's too much noise or not enough information
- More supported modules for cloud services within aws
May 08, 2024
Nice survey!
- Integration with other tools/providers
- Easy to use/ user friendly
- Maybe the host/group section
- Nothing special to add
May 08, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
- Off-loads running playbooks to another server/workflow
- Job template visualization
- The surveys do not include dynamic variables. It would be nice for job template surveys to require variables based on selection.
May 08, 2024
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
- Scheduled workflows
- Handling failures in workflows
- Logs playbook output for future review
- I actually think they accomplish all the things within my needs quite well.