Ansible

Red Hat Automation platform is excellent tool to run Ansible jobs for those who are beginners with running and writing Ansible playbooks right up to the experts.

We are looking forward to using the new Event Driven Ansible

Based on its idempotent nature, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for the following scenarios:

1.) Configuration management: Ansible excels in managing and maintaining consistent configurations across a large number of systems. Whether it's configuring software, network devices, or infrastructure components, Ansible's idempotent operations ensure that desired states are achieved and maintained, even in complex environments.

2.) Continuous deployment and integration (CI/CD): Ansible is well suited for automating application deployment and orchestrating CI/CD pipelines. Its idempotent execution ensures consistent and reproducible deployments, making it easier to roll out updates, manage multiple environments, and integrate with popular CI/CD tools.

3.) Infrastructure provisioning and orchestration: Ansible is an excellent choice for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources. Its idempotent playbooks enable organizations to automate the creation and configuration of servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud resources, allowing for scalable and consistent infrastructure provisioning.

4.) System administration and operations: Ansible's idempotent nature makes it ideal for system administration tasks and operational automation. Whether it's managing user accounts, updating software packages, or performing routine maintenance tasks, Ansible ensures that operations are executed reliably and consistently across different systems and environments.

Ansible is the way...

For patching large environments that do not require Redhat Satellite.

AAP is well suited for customers that need to automate their configuration but don't necessarily have a lot of in house expertise and would benefit from the support of Red Hat.

Ansible has been key to our success with server hardening as well as hardened image creations.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for infrastructures with repeating patterns and processes.
But also for granular automation it can be used.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automation can serve as a form of documentation.

There is almost no scenario where Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform makes no sense to use at all.

It is well suited in enviroments where there is a lot interaction with API. Its not well suited for working with multiple users or playbooks where there are lot of variables included. It can see the benefits where there are dislocated environments with low bandwidth. Use of hop nodes are really beneficial in combination of isolated nodes.

I personally use Ansible at least once a day for some of my work and whenever I use I found something that I can improve in my work using Ansible

Ansible works well when managing a large number of devices and servers. It helps to standardize builds and automate provisioning of servers and software so that builds are done quickly and repeatably. It works well for SSH-based hosts and standard unix-like systems. It also works well for system administrators who may not have a strong background in scripting and automation. It is a simple and readable language and a playbook is easy to pass along a team and collaborate on.

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.

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.

Ansible works well if you can rely on having rock solid SSH connectivity. It also works well with the instances that you're configurations are relatively disposable. As Ansible makes changes as it processes the playbook, it is possible for changes to be made halfway down the playbook and then a failure to put the instance in an in-between state where it's neither the before state or after state. Rather it's somewhere in between.

Simple, efficient management of hosts. Easy-to-maintain configuration files, with lots of flexibility in the way you can keep those files in code management. It's especially useful for smaller fleets or for one-off runs. Perhaps not as effective in maintaining large fleets of servers, especially when you need to keep all the hosts in-sync.

Well suited for rapid infrastructure development/provisioning.
Well suited for immutable infrastructure.
Not as well suited for large-scale infrastructure.

Ansible is a great orchestrator. One-time shot operations are something that Ansible does very well. Its also pretty easy to understand in that there are no dependencies other than ssh and a python json serializer. However if someone wants to enforce something in a declarative fashion, Puppet/Chef/CFEngine are better than Ansible at this task.

I would recommend Ansible to any business of small to medium size that is looking for an automation tool. For any company looking for something lightweight that could be run on a personal computer rather than a server, I would recommend Ansible. I feel like it is well suited for smaller environments as the task load tends to be lighter and Ansible does usually have slower run times than larger scale tools like Chef and Puppet. Small scale cloud environments do very well as Ansible has a plethora of modules to support many different IaaS structures. Processes that have an extensive amount of tasks to perform are also not well-suited for Ansible in my opinion and should probably be avoided. Large scale implementations may also want to avoid Ansible as I feel that it scales poorly compared to some other competitors.