Item: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Rating: 9
Author: John Reeve

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Playbooks double as documentation of server environments.
Makes it easy for developers to deploy.
Automates the deployment process.

Cons

Some of the modules could use more features.

Return on Investment

It has sped up our deployments considerably.
It has help developers do more DevOps work.

Alternatives Considered

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.

Other Software Used

GitHub, Apache Subversion

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Ansible Reliability

Performance

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.

Integrating Ansible

Ease of Integration

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.

Comments

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Ansible: a great way to get started with automated deployments