Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. wasmCloud

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

If you want to start pivoting your legacy code into a serverless paradigm this is the platform to target. If you want to start moving away from walled gardens and back into a space where code isn't centralized, costs can be offset by utilizing customer or edge hardware this is the platform to focus on. If you want a model that will scale well past many of the existing serverless frameworks, that won't get caught up in the security weaknesses of current paradigms this is what you need to invest in. If you want modern code to interact with legacy code in a safe way that doesn't expose vulnerabilities you can't patch against wasmCloud is awesome. If you want to write simple code that can jump from cloud to cloud to the user or edge node check it out!

• 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

• Host density of workloads
• Streamlined security approach to writing code and reducing bloat
• Interoperability of modules written in different languages

• 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

• Simplified open-source model for on-boarding devs, i.e. bare host no elixir/GUI
• Home-labbers guide to wasmCloud
• Spark more community involvement for capability providers

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

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

wasmCloud is still in the early stages of development but the product is rapidly evolving and stabilizing and I feel it will be a preferred way of deploying and managing remote, distributed applications in the future.

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

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

The core team is extremely responsive in their provided channels. From slack to github issues, there is never a long wait for feedback or guidance.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

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

Have not made a purchase yet as we are still in the POC stage.

Incentivized

The team is incredibly helpful and informative about the product - I have not needed to use their professional services thus far.

• 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

• WasmCloud has massively simplified the required ops expertise needed to run modern software.