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Ansible

Ansible

Overview

What is Ansible?

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…

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Recent Reviews
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Video Reviews

3 videos

Is it worth it? | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
04:14
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Words from an Automation Architect
03:12
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Systems Admin Thoughts
06:37
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Pricing

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Basic Tower

5,000

On Premise
per year

Enterprise Tower

10,000

On Premise
per year

Premium Tower

14,000

On Premise
per year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

WebLogic Continuous Deployment with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

YouTube

Trusted Automation Series: F5 BigIP

YouTube

Manage your Cisco devices with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

YouTube

Network Automation Basics - First Ansible Playbook

YouTube

Deep Dive - Automated NetOps - Ansible for Network GitOps

YouTube
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Product Details

What is Ansible?

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.

Its Automation Hub provides a one-stop-shop for Ansible content that is backed by support from Red Hat and its partners to deliver additional reassurance for demanding environments.

The Ansible project and Ansible Engine are open source technologies. The Ansible project is built by the community (ansible.com/community) for the benefit of the community. Ansible Engine is developed by Red Hat with the explicit intent of being used as an enterprise IT platform.

Ansible Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsLinux
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Reviewers rate Performance highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of Ansible are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(261)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-5 of 5)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ansible is being used by a certain department for testing purposes. We tried it for a while and had an evaluation on it. It is a very nice tool for managing the servers we have on cloud. It is easy to use and powerful to manage all the servers we have. We are very happy with the result.
  • It is very easy to implement.
  • It controls the servers with configuration and executes it well
  • It is not that pricy.
  • With its easiness to learn, you still have to do most of the things in Bash. Would be nice to have UI.
  • Enterprise support is not that good.
  • Windows can be a pain.
If your company is using cloud services like either Amazon Web Service or Google Cloud Platform, you will have time to implements lots of servers and managing them can be a pain. Ansible can be the help that enables you to manage all the config files you have for your servers and executes them in seconds.
  • It makes server managing easier.
  • It increases the efficiency of our operation team.
  • It helps the whole team be at the same pace.
Ansible has unique features in terms of server managing and configuring. It is easy to use and fits the Red Hat Linux well since they are closely related. Our servers are mostly Red Hat, so it makes sense to use Ansible. But we are still exploring which is the best.
Ansible is very friendly to start with. With just a few configurations, you have full management to your servers. You can configure it and implement it in seconds. You can also set up a cron job to make sure it gets implemented. It suits our need perfectly. Support can be a bit hard.
Ansible is very easy to integrate. If you have already spun up servers, installing Ansible on each of them could be time-consuming. But if you spun up the server with the golden template, that can be easily solved. Once Ansible is installed on each server, it is not hard to configure at all.
John Reeve | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using Ansible to configure our servers and to deploy our software to those servers. Our developers use it to deploy updates to staging and production environments, which enables them to work more in a DevOps role.
  • Playbooks double as documentation of server environments.
  • Makes it easy for developers to deploy.
  • Automates the deployment process.
  • Some of the modules could use more features.
Ansible is very well suited for smaller development and production environments where Chef or Puppet seems like overkill. Or, to anyone who needs to document their server configuration. I'd recommend it to anyone considering alternative solutions for that same reason. And the fact that it runs over SSH makes it really easy to set up and run, which also makes it a good choice for those working in smaller environments.
  • It has sped up our deployments considerably.
  • It has help developers do more DevOps work.
  • Chef
Chef was awesome, but it was overkill for what we needed. Ansible doesn't require a central hub which made it easier to set up. And the fact that Ansible runs over SSH made it an easier choice because it would use preexisting configurations. For example, we didn't need to update our firewalls or install any new software on the servers being updated.
Ansible has always operated as we expected it to. It does require digging into the configuration documentation at times, especially when using some of the modules, but that's just a small learning curve. Once it's set up it runs great. We've not had any issues.
We did not have to install anything outside of Ansible itself. It fit perfectly into our Linux development and production environments because it takes advantage of the operating system's default configurations, such as SSH and Python.
Dylan Cauwels | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ansible is a tool used by our head DevOps engineer and others who elect to do so. It is mainly used for automating server setup/tear down and ensuring concurrency exists across all our application platforms. It's an incredible tool for setting up any environment without having to install the program on the server you wish to target.
  • Automating any machine-level processes that you need to do to set up an environment.
  • Great for sending out consistent changes to a group of servers.
  • Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
  • There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.
Great for automating groups of servers and ensuring updates are pushed to all of them (simultaneously if needed). It's hard to manage large groups of servers, and this tool makes it almost too simple. If there is only one server that is unique from the others, Ansible will not be as useful, but can still help track your changes.
  • Allowed us to manage our large application server groups as if they were a single machine. Gives you a ton of freedom in how you want to set up your instances without worrying about how you're going to manage updates.
  • Gave our lower-level developers the possibility to change environment-level qualities that they otherwise would've never understood how to do.
  • Chef
Chef is something that was used previously by our head engineer and is quite similar to Ansible. They're both great configuration management tools. However, since Ansible is agent-less, we decided to switch for the convenience and quick-start nature of Ansible. Along with that is the fact that Ansible's books are written in YAML vs a fully fleshed language like Ruby, which means it's much easier to pick up, understand, and write for our new users.
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.
The system can be hard to understand at times, but that's true for any new technology. Agentless means the servers don't have to be touched to run your books. YAML also allows the programs to be understood much quicker than someone trying to learn Ruby for the first time, like on Chef.
John Grosjean | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Ansible every day in our CI/CD pipeline. With everything in AWS, and constantly setting up new instances, other agent-based products were out of the question. And since Ansible has added so much AWS management to it's latest versions, we can manage infrastructure just as easily as we deploy our application. There is no way we could keep up with the developers without Ansible.
  • Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
  • Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
  • Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.
  • Syntax.
  • Lacks descriptive error messages. The most basic errors are easy enough, but the more edge case errors can send you on a wild goose chase real quick.
  • Open Source. In many ways, this is a good thing, but it also means support is limited to community forums and such. So many people use it that it hasn't been an issue for us, but it means researching your own answer instead of just calling support.
I would recommend Ansible to anyone, but I recognize it might not fit everyone's needs. I'm not as familiar with Chef, Puppet, or Salt, but they each have their strengths. For us, we needed to be able to manage a new server the moment it was created, so agent-based solutions were out. For our use, Ansible does everything we've asked it to.
  • Our deployments went to a CI/CD model a while back, and there's no way we could keep up if it wasn't for Ansible. It was convenient when we started using it, but Ansible is now essential for our small DevOps team to keep up with the rest of the business. We keep automating more and more with Ansible, just so that we can stay sane.
We looked at Puppet and Chef, but Ansible won because it's agentless. You trade some features, for example, someone could manually make a change on the server, and Ansible wouldn't know. But that's not a problem for us, and we needed something that we could run immediately on a new server.
Out of the box, Ansible can be slow over a bad connection, as it's establishing an SSH connection to the target server for each little task. There are some adjustments you can make to the defaults that greatly improve performance. And if you run Ansible on the same network as the target (i.e. by using a jump box or Jenkins server), then it can be crazy fast. I'd give it a 10 for speed except that it does require these adjustments first.
Can be buggy at times, but the engine is pretty basic, so it's usually fairly straight forward to integrate. We have it integrated with Jenkins and CircleCI without any issues.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ansible is currently being used by our integration and infrastructure team. It is used across the whole project. Ansible is being used as a rapid deployment solution. It is being utilized as a tool to speed up the deployment of our system and make the deployment as turn key as possible.
  • Easy to learn programming. It just utilizes YAML which is easy to learn and doesn't take as much time to pick up.
  • Fast deployment. If you are allowed to use SSH in your architecture, it is a very fast deployment.
  • Repeatability, you can deploy a node many times and get the same result each time.
  • Ansible currently doesn't have a way to keep a node in a current state like what puppet or DSC can do.
  • Ansible uses SSH which sometimes is not a good security practice.
  • You have to be good to set up system totally with secure SSH keys, Sudo, etc.
If you have an environment in which you just want to push out VM's or containers very rapidly and don't need them to stay in a current state, then ansible is perfect for that use case. If you want an environment where you push out the code and the system ensures the VM/container remains in that state, Ansible is not really the solution; there are better options.
  • Easy to deploy.
  • Ansible is free.
  • Helps users deploy clusters.
Ansible is all command line unless you pay for Tower, so it is very quick because the GUI isn't there. Even with Tower, it is pretty quick and response time is not an issue. No impact on many other systems unless your playbooks are extremely complicated. It's all based on what and how you write your playbooks.
It's pretty easy. Just write your YAML files and tell the system what you want it to do. It is straight forward and doesn't take a whole lot of time to pick up and master. It is an easy system to get up and running. The security is a headache when it comes to integration.
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