Digital.ai Release vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Mainly used in release management where all deployments are well managed and processed further based on the approval system. Complete enterprise-level solution with minor difficulties which need to be added to product improvement features. Integration with other CI-CD tools makes it easier to perform tasks in terms of release and deployments.

Incentivized

For automating the configuration of a multi-node, multi-domain (Storage, VM, Container) cluster, Ansible is still the best choice; however, it is not an easy task to achieve. Creating the infrastructure layer, i.e., creating network nodes, VMs, and K8s clusters, still can't be achieved via Ansible. Additionally, error handling remains complex to resolve.

Incentivized

• Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
• XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
• XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Pagination of data - across tool.
• User Roles Management API can be improved.
• Case insensitive ID's are treated differently making user face login and access issues.
• Dependency on Universal template/custom plugins creation should be reduced.
• Code versioning of templates is very difficult.
• Better error handling.
• Futures Timeout Issues.

Incentivized

• I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
• Give out Lightspeed for free.

Incentivized

Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use, easy to navigate and learn. Manages releases with proper approvals in a systematic manner. Though it needs minor improvements in terms of pagination (data loading), access management, but, overall the tool helps in increasing productivity and less time for production deployments.

Incentivized

It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts

Incentivized

Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.

Incentivized

Support is not good at all. To this day, I have to mail my queries and their support site does not log in for me (me alone). But, upon contacting many times, no one helps with a proper response. Though good thing is, I get a proper response over mail too. But, being informative about the tool and not on the issues faced by users outside of the process to get support should also be addressed equally. Which is currently missing in support.

Incentivized

There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

XL release is simpler to configure and deploy to the organization than other change management platforms I have used. That simplicity has minor drawbacks requiring you to fit into a limited set of control methods but that exercise helped us simplify a needlessly onerous process.

Incentivized

AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.

Incentivized

• XL release has improved our consistency of release process, removing multiple days worth of manual status checking and coordination.
• XL release has allowed us to increase the number of beta releases we can support due to simplifying our release actions.

Incentivized

• POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
• NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
• POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)

Incentivized