Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
We use it to automate tasks so that things are consistent and across the board, we use it to deploy software, deploy agents, basically …
Starting at $5,000 per year
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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…
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Reviewer Pros & Cons
- 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 t...
- I saw a demo this morning during the keynote where they talked about using natural language and basically having the playbook write itself. I thought ...
Video Reviews
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Is it worth it? | Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Words from an Automation Architect
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review | Systems Admin Thoughts
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Pricing
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
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
WebLogic Continuous Deployment with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
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Trusted Automation Series: F5 BigIP
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Manage your Cisco devices with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
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Network Automation Basics - First Ansible Playbook
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Deep Dive - Automated NetOps - Ansible for Network GitOps
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Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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.
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 Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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May 25, 2023
Ansible... It is the way
The platform addresses several business problems, such as:
1.) Manual and repetitive tasks: Ansible Automation Platform helps eliminate manual, repetitive tasks by automating them. This reduces human error, increases efficiency, and allows IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
2.) Configuration management: Managing configurations across a large number of systems can be challenging. Ansible Automation Platform enables centralized management of configurations, ensuring consistency and compliance across the infrastructure.
3.) Application deployment and orchestration: Deploying and managing applications across different environments can be time-consuming and error-prone. Ansible Automation Platform simplifies application deployment and provides orchestration capabilities to streamline the process.
4.) Infrastructure provisioning: Provisioning and managing infrastructure resources can be complex, especially in cloud or hybrid environments. Ansible Automation Platform helps automate infrastructure provisioning, enabling organizations to scale resources efficiently and consistently.
1.) Manual and repetitive tasks: Ansible Automation Platform helps eliminate manual, repetitive tasks by automating them. This reduces human error, increases efficiency, and allows IT teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
2.) Configuration management: Managing configurations across a large number of systems can be challenging. Ansible Automation Platform enables centralized management of configurations, ensuring consistency and compliance across the infrastructure.
3.) Application deployment and orchestration: Deploying and managing applications across different environments can be time-consuming and error-prone. Ansible Automation Platform simplifies application deployment and provides orchestration capabilities to streamline the process.
4.) Infrastructure provisioning: Provisioning and managing infrastructure resources can be complex, especially in cloud or hybrid environments. Ansible Automation Platform helps automate infrastructure provisioning, enabling organizations to scale resources efficiently and consistently.
- Configuration management at scale
- Infrastructure as code
- Cross-platform and cross-environment compatibility
- Managing systems off corporate network; i.e. company provided equipment.
- Think windows MDM... how do we manage systems off of corporate network.
- Community and ecosystem behind Ansible
- An extensive list of modules to get things done
- Increased efficiency and productivity: By automating manual and repetitive tasks, organizations can achieve significant time savings and improve overall operational efficiency.
- Consistency and compliance: Ansible Automation Platform helps enforce consistent configurations and policy compliance across the infrastructure.
December 01, 2017
DevOps Swiss Army Knife
Ansible is a powerful tool for many DevOps cases, including generic automation scripts, configuration management, and infrastructure orchestration. We've used it mainly for complex application deployments - for each application, we wrote an Ansible playbook to deploy the application and all dependencies to target Chef-managed environments. The deployment process for each application varied a lot and was often very complex, and each playbook would have different logic for configuration and validations.
Those applications ranged from J2EE applications to cron jobs. Target VMs would range from Tomcat application servers to plain Linux machines.
I have also used Ansible for other uses such as for simplifying interaction with a large cluster of nodes to perform system administration tasks (e.g. fetching logs, investigating issues across nodes of a cluster..etc). I have also used its Python library to create custom automation scripts. It worked very well for all cases above.
Those applications ranged from J2EE applications to cron jobs. Target VMs would range from Tomcat application servers to plain Linux machines.
I have also used Ansible for other uses such as for simplifying interaction with a large cluster of nodes to perform system administration tasks (e.g. fetching logs, investigating issues across nodes of a cluster..etc). I have also used its Python library to create custom automation scripts. It worked very well for all cases above.
- Decentralized configuration management - Ansible supports "desired state" syntax and is a great alternative to centralized configuration management solutions. If you think that maintaining an infrastructure is an overkill for your needs, then you should consider Ansible. Ansible is "agentless" and all you need is version control, SSH access, and proper organization skills!
- Great for writing clean and readable automation scripts. In my opinion, Ansible Playbooks are the new Shell scripts. It enforces readable structure yet maintains a great flexibility. Add to that, the ability to write playbooks in reusable "roles" as well as the large repository of built-in Ansible modules, Ansible becomes a very awesome alternative to writing complex Shell/Bash scripts.
- Very powerful tool for system administrators to reliably and quickly interact with nodes of large clusters. With proper organization of your host inventory in versioned-control files, Ansible becomes an indispensable tool for Sys Admins to investigate issues and perform routine tasks across large clusters.
- Steep learning curve - I have found that Ansible has a steeper learning curve when it comes to playbooks and roles. This could be a side-effect of its power and flexibility. I still believe more could be done to make writing roles simpler.
- There is no a public repository of playbooks or a "package manager" that facilitates download community-maintained Ansible playbooks.
- Ansible is a great investment if used for its well-suited scenarios. It has had a positive impact on my clients who used it to modernize their application deployment process. Ansible has 1) increased the reliability of the deployment process and 2) reduced scripts maintenance overhead.
- Since Ansible is simpler and faster to get started with - compared to centralized configuration management solutions - it can be tempting to use it initially for simpler applications/infrastructure that are anticipated to evolve to complex ecosystems, you may find yourself having to rewrite in another tool in such cases.
- Chef, Terraform and Bash
- Ansible is much simpler to get up and running with than Chef, as it requires no infrastructure or agent process or any configuration on the target machine. All you need is SSH access! However, you lose the capabilities that Chef server offers such as data bags (centralized data store with support for encryption), authorization rules, inventory status, periodic configuration pulls, version locking etc.
- Ansible combines both infrastructure orchestration and configuration capabilities, therefore it can be used as a single tool to both create and configure your VMs on the cloud. However, it lacks the comprehensive support of various cloud resource types that Terraform offers. Terraform can be integrated with Ansible instead to implement an end-to-end process.
- Ansible is a great replacement for Bash scripts. It natively supports many modules that will save you so many lines of codes, enforces readable YAML structure and is still very flexible and powerful.
February 27, 2017
Ansible streamlines automated server provisioning
We use Ansible to automate provisioning of both Amazon AMIs and other EC2 resources. It orchestrates the installation of all of the software we need to power our platform in production and leaves us with a reliable, predictable machine state on every run.
We've also used Ansible to vary the state of dependencies installed on a machine after it's been deployed to production.
We've also used Ansible to vary the state of dependencies installed on a machine after it's been deployed to production.
- Predictable machine state.
- Cross-platform operation. We run Ansible from both Mac and Linux reliably.
- There is no "official" Windows support for a host machine. Some of our team is on Windows, so this is a major drawback.
- Some of the community-maintained packages break dependencies, requiring us to toggle a "verbose" flag in Ansible to dive into the details of what failed.
- A recent update to Ansible itself broke on the LTS version of Ubuntu we were using. As older versions of Ansible had been purged from the package manager, we had to switch to a different installation routine entirely (using Python and pip) to restore to an active, reliable state.
- The time savings of not having to manually provision servers has been huge!
- Keeping multiple servers in complete parity with one another has been incredibly helpful in reducing the number of single-machine configuration bugs present during development.
SaltStack's syntax and configuration felt a little too much like "black magic" for reliability. Several third-party packages were referenced by name only and either hid or obfuscated how they installed their dependencies (or were targeting only one distribution of Linux and failing to disclose incompatibilities with others). Ansible is far more flexible and the community package support is far superior.