A solution for continuous delivery of any application to any environment, and an application-release solution that infuses automation into the continuous delivery and continuous deployment (CI/CD) process and provides robust visibility, traceability and auditing capabilities.
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Ansible
Score 9.0 out of 10
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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.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy is excellent for code deployments such as Java, .Net, C++, etc. It can also deploy and run SQLs reasonably well. Where it lacks is the ability for executables, Jars, WARs, EARs, etc.
I think it's the best defacto orchestrator for automation because it's so easy to integrate in other tools to it (dynatrace, cyberark, terraform, etc). It is a lot for a new or smaller team to use so I wouldn't recommend it to a new team using Ansible, in that case using Ansible navigator is a better start to understanding playbooks/inventories before diving into the complexity of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. EDA also takes a lot of connectivity between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and target systems to get working which can be difficult in very locked down envs unless you have approval from many other teams like networking and security.
IBM UrbanCode Deploy does code deployments easy enough, but configurations or ex deployments are a little more complicated. I work on packaged systems, so most of the code I get is form a vendor that I have to deploy.
IBM UebanCode Deploy integration into the mainframe world would be ideal. My company uses Mainframe and OpenSystems technologies, and many times there are dependencies between the deployments.
We are extremely happy with the use of AAP. It's better than expected, There is almost no limit when thinking of automation. The only problem is that the day to day is consuming a big part of our time. Patching and checking vulnerabilities are virtually killing us. But we can only improve with AAP.
It's challenging to get a working knowledge of the product without having someone show you the ropes. Linking components with applications and applications with resource trees and resource trees with application deploys is not intuitive. However, once past that learning curve, the possibilities open up, and things become easier to understand and allow for further granularity.
Everything has room for improvement, but Ansible is the best tool out there for what it does and what it can do. There are plenty of features and capabilities that can be added, but it's just a matter of time before it happens.
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.
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.
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.
First, it keeps our entire server infrastructure aligned with our standards and reduces the time and effort needed to maintain our systems.
Automate routine IT tasks to save time, reduce errors, and ensure every server is configured and updated consistently.
Tasks that used to take our teams weeks to complete manually now run automatically and reliably, with full visibility, making our infrastructure management more effective and our compliance tracking much easier.
