Ansible

The thing I mentioned earlier where we're constantly dealing with federal regulations or new agents that they want us to install and deploy and just getting those out in a consistent manner in a canned installation via Playbook is ideal.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is the best tool out there for carrying out automation processes. On my end, it allows me to manage IT and network procedures across software-defined and cloud-based networks.

The product is invaluable in the areas where post infra deployment configuration is required. It is not too suited for infra deployment as it is hard to maintain and remediate the state.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a one-stop solution for executing and managing automation. I can’t wait to see other business users using this tool to develop and deploy applications.

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 IT shops that do not have much developer experience and/or need to have a robust service catalog, AAP is pretty weak. The hybrid cloud story is muddy at best and could stand to have a CI/CD pipeline-like tool that allows non-developers to create complex workflows using smaller low-code piece parts.

For patching large environments that do not require Redhat Satellite.

I've used service now self-service portal to front-end requests from customers that then kick off Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform templates to complete the requests.

Installing - applying a workflow to a large number of servers.

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.

Code correction,

Ansible Automation Platform has been solid when applying STIG/CIS guidelines and is great for managing configuration drift.

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

It is very good at working with any Linux system as well as many of the major products on the market. It's hard to work with Microsoft because of the many prerequisites needed on Windows servers. It can also be difficult to work with out of the box with systems that might require extra dependencies that need to be added to an Execution Environment to interact with.

For us we use it to deploy windows, linux server provisioning.

Configuration management, any repeatable workflows.

It's the API glue to disparate systems.

Server build process from deployment to hardening Secure cloud resources Keep security requirements up to date on end points

It is well-suited for large organizations with many disparate teams who would all like to use the platform for automation orchestration.

It is well suited for application deployment, hardening systems, user management, and services management such as firewalls.

It helps us alot to have stable IT environments and operartions

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.

It's most useful if you often need to deploy machines that have exactly same configuration and pre-installed programs. It's also easy to make changes into them if needed, in best case you can just run one command and the change can be executed into multiple machines thanks to roles. However it seems to be mostly intended for Linux machines.

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