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Ansible

Score9.1 out of 10

609 Reviews and Ratings

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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.

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Categories & Use Cases

Product Demos

Who Buys & Uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Ansible Reviews

What users are saying about Ansible.
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Pros

  • Robust automation of IT operations and business processes
  • Effective configuration management and drift mitigation
  • Streamlined infrastructure deployment and provisioning

Cons

  • User interface could be more modern and intuitive
  • Documentation lacks comprehensive examples and best practices
  • Learning curve for new users, especially non-developers

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Infrastructure are a Match

Incentivized
Rob Weiss
Expert Infrastructure Engineer in Information Technology at Discover Financial Services (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform since 2017 for network infrastructure and network security automation. I have built solutions for several use cases including network compliance and self healing, F5 VIP building self-service, Firewall Policy automation, and several smaller use cases. We have many complex automation workflows that integrate with other platforms like Jenkins, GitHub, ServiceNow, and plenty of others.

Pros

  • Standardize controls and visibility for automation.
  • Provide RBAC and Vault for improved automation security and support.
  • Job Scheduling is much more effective than Cron or other home-grown solutions.
  • The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform API is one of the best features as it makes automation accessible from any other platform.

Cons

  • Testing Framework to perform CICD-like functionality for Ansible Playbooks, Workflows, and Collections.
  • Built-in development tools allowing testing playbook runs within a VENV or EE on the CLI directly or within an IDE. The challenge being that Ansible is not always available for direct installation on a user laptop for security reasons.
  • Could use improvement on standards for modules to provide better feedback from the underlying language (Python) for easier troubleshooting and support.

Return on Investment

  • A 45min manual process to build VIPs with a SLA of 1 week can now be completed as self-service within 10 minutes in production.
  • Firewall Policy ranges in review and implementation time depending on complexity of requests. Our policy automation is able to provide detailed and accurate decisioning information that allows the operations team to approve requests and have them automatically implemented within minutes. Not only does this free up Ops for more important efforts, but it opens access many times quicker which allows much faster time to market.

Usability

Scalable platform that stabilizes workflows and automations

Incentivized
Olivia Byrnes
Software Developer in Information Technology at Hexaview Technologies Inc (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I like how the Red Hat Ansible Automation platform allows my team to automate tasks across on-premise and cloud environments. The platform centralises everything to streamline workflows and enhance efficient team collaboration. One of the great milestones that we have achieved as software development team is how we have been able to scale down our daily tasks with simplified infrastructure.

Pros

  • Automation of tasks
  • Streamlining workflows across different environments
  • Secure data virtualization

Cons

  • The graphics needs to be improved for better workflow enhancement.
  • The AAP lacks underlying OIDC configurations.

Return on Investment

  • Automation of tasks has enhanced positive ROI and reduced cost of production.
  • Administration of application development with server configuration has enhanced effective workflows.

Usability

Other Software Used

Perplexity, SurveyMonkey, Miro

Red Hat [...]

Incentivized
Christian Boldin
Cybersecurity engineer in Engineering at MDA (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Configuration Management and STIG Requirements for environment systems. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows the automation of processes that can take hours and allows team members to be free and work on others tasks while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is doing the work in the background after the launch is submitted. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows work to flow seamless and effective on day to day tasks.

Pros

  • Automated updates
  • STIG requirements
  • Pushing products to a mass of systems

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact has been lessening the footprint of our building and automating most of the tasks

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Other Software Used

Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Requires up-front work but delivers in spades

Incentivized
Daniel Beckman
Linux Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Library of Congress (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Ansible Automation Platform to perform various maintenance operations on our RHEL servers. A major use case is the deployment of new servers (on-premise VMs) and applying standard configuration.

Pros

  • Deploying a new VM from scratch
  • Applying a standard software stack
  • Analyze current environment

Cons

  • If a machine is not already in an inventory, a template (playbook, role) cannot be applied. There is no easy way to give it an ad-hoc list of hosts at run-time.
  • It does not remove the need to create YAML files. We could have wider adoption (e.g. among Windows server admins) by having a GUI for creating basic workflows.
  • Getting a profile (job) to run right can take a lot of trial and error. Some 'static analysis' tools built into the web interface would be helpful.
  • We sometimes run into dependency errors on the target hosts related to their Python environment.

Return on Investment

  • New server deployments that once took a week or more now take under an hour.
  • RHEL server configuration is far more consistent.
  • Responding to security advisories is no longer a source of panic; it's routine.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Open Source Puppet

Other Software Used

Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Lightspeed, Apache Solr

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is Cool

Incentivized
Courtney Smith
Information Systems Architect in Information Technology at GTRI (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has been used for provisioning and patching our client and server systems

Pros

  • It allows integration with multiple enterprise applications
  • It supports multiple OS
  • Playbook development can support both simple and complex tasks

Cons

  • The inventory feature should be able to support adding multiple systems outside Active Directory and/or Satellite
  • There should be an option for exporting templates from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to core-Ansible and vice-versa

Return on Investment

  • It has simplified and reduced the deployment of our client systems
  • It has allowed us to reduce errors that error in manual deployments
  • Has helped us define baseline and fine-tun our configuration management of both deployment and patching

Usability

Alternatives Considered

PDQ Deploy & Inventory and Red Hat Satellite

Other Software Used

PDQ Deploy & Inventory, Red Hat Satellite

Ansible Alternatives

Products similar to Ansible that may also meet your needs.
View all Ansible alternatives
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