IBM watsonx™ Code Assistant for Red Hat® Ansible® Lightspeed demystifies the process of Ansible Playbook creation through generative AI-powered content recommendations. Purpose-built to accelerate IT Automation, the product is designed to deliver automation content recommendations for an enhanced Ansible experience.
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Ansible
Score 9.2 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.
I would recommend for understanding your Mainframe components not for the GenAI piece involved from just my experience. The explanations were not up to the quality we wanted but its deterministic side provided a lot of value for different members of my team. The visuals would be great. I am not sure where it currently stands
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.
It can automatically revamp specific parts of the COBOL code and very useful when we want to maintain the existing codebase but improve its structure. I can highlight a block of COBOL code and use Watsonx Assistant to suggest ways to simplify and optimize it.
Legacy codes, mostly written in COBOL, are cryptic and difficult to understand. Watsonx Assistant analyzes the code and provides insights into its functionalities and dependencies. A great help when working on older applications where understanding the codebase is crucial.
A step-by-step approach to modernize our applications slowly and steadily, so that we can control the process better. I don't have to change everything at once. Instead, I can focus on specific COBOL modules and automatically convert them to Java.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Security is very important in the mainframe world. At Watsonx, we work in the trusted Z environment, which has strong security rules, stricter than those of other cloud-based solutions. My domain is primarily mainframe modernization and Watsonx Code Assistant for Z is specifically used to understand and work with COBOL, the language used majorly in mainframe environments, not any general-purpose language that used in various platforms. It understands the nuances of COBOL and Assembler specific to the Z environment, something crucial for my work.
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.
While manual review and adjustments are still needed, it's a 50-70% reduction in manual coding. Think about it - a project estimated to take a year is done in 4-6 months.
We've been able to introduce new features and improvements more quickly by updating our technology faster. One relevant example is we recently released an important update to our main product 45 days earlier than planned.
It has been a smart move and it's really paid off for our company. We've cut down a lot of time we used to spend doing things manually. We now spend our resources more wisely, work faster and finish projects sooner and as a result, we've reduced our development costs by 25%.
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..)
