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.
Ease of use, once you understand how to configure the tool, everything is a piece of cake. It runs pretty fast also, can use GITLab to manage our playbooks. Security options is great, can setup granular security depending on each team using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. …
For the most part pretty well. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform will always have room for improvement for a while since it really is a bit of a moving target and will always strive for new capabilities. RHEL of course has been around for some time and it does what it is …
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform requires little to no configuration on the nodes to manage the systems. However, this means that the inventory source of Truth must come from somewhere else. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is able to manage things beyond typical nodes …
Can't have one without the other! Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform drives our RHEL environment, and our RHEL environment made Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform the obvious choice.
We were Puppet users. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform made more sense to us because of the focus on Ansible content to support our AIX systems and RHEL systems. We have also seen that the learning curve for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is better than we experienced …
AAP absolutely rocks. The upstream AWX is great as well. Just depends on where I am at. If I am homelabing its AWX work it is AAP. AAP is far superior then the competitors offerings.
I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can …
AAP is a building block in majority of build/deployment and configuration processes that involve the traditional compute (ie. bare metal and VM based) systems running RHEL, as well as the modern platforms to run containerized workloads, such as OpenShift. We use AAP to automate …
AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited to ensure that systems are in a specific state - when it is run against those systems. More tooling in the area of periodic scanning would be helpful for compliance folks. In addition, it would be helpful to be able to import a profile to use as a baseline and derive playbooks based on those. One should not necessarily rely on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to keep a device from drifting. It is not a Tripwire that will detect and revert a change quickly. However, it could do well if used for periodic scans. Event-driven Ansible shows promise. If it is better integrated with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in terms of things like the approach to variables it could become more widely used more quickly.
For example, when we want to do a deployment of a new software agent or a new piece of code it also helps us to offload tasks to junior team members to where we can just put a series of complicated steps into a playbook and hand it off to an operator level person to coordinate and deploy. Like if it requires an outage or something, they just can focus on coordinating a schedule for doing it, but not on the technical aspects of the task.
Workflows should have more flexible paths than just success or failure.
The upgrade process can be challenging with differences in security and environment.
There is an opportunity to add CICD functionality into the tool.
For development, it would be nice to have the option of editing a repo directly from AAP to allow quick tests/reruns. Then, allow it to push the updates back or create a new branch/PR in GitHub.
The RBAC is good but could use improvements. One example would be an option that allows admins to assume the access of another user to validate it works as expected.
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 doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry.
