Item: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We manage git repositories with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform code that assist in making our laptops/desktops/servers compliant with corporate policy. We have ancillary playbooks/template for edge cases, and unique deployments. We also enforce scheduled patching and reboots. While we have experimented with callback, it is not yet as useful as we had hoped.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Ensuring a consistent image when deploying a newly imaged system. We ensure our logging, backup and security agents are uniformly deployed and functioning.
Providing tailor-able deployments which suit requester's needs. For example, if they require access to network file shares.
Enforcing "patch Tuesday" for select inventories.

Cons

The output of complex templates, which include nested roles, is difficult to parse, especially when using variables across roles.
Lifecycle management of hosts is difficult to do well. Our subscription covers the necessary systems, but removing old systems is still a manual process. We attempt to script it, and haven't found a mature solution.
Integration into a reliable password manager, or identity service to remove the ssh password requirement is more complex than seems necessary.

Return on Investment

Positive: once mature templates are in effect, it completely trivializes a standard deployment baseline. Order of magnitude faster, and much higher confidence in success.
Positive: It acts as a gateway to absorb new external collections, and brings into our environment tools that maybe useful across divisions.
Negative: With newer operators, it serves to obscure the technical operations on the endpoints. "Run the template" is not how you make IT staff experienced. This limits their progression, and requires a separate method to train.

Usability

The interface is not intuitive. The terminology is unique to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and the workflows/visualizer is only as descriptive as the top level name. My experience is fine. However I have used "ansible"-core for a while. For my contemporaries, it is confusing for quite some time. This is also exaggerated by separate roles and "locations". Even when they can run templates successfully, they don't really understand what is goin on.

Alternatives Considered

Puppet Enterprise

Puppet has Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform beat on metrics. This isn't a fair comparison due to the agent oriented nature of puppet. Ansible is much smoother to start using and appreciably faster to install, configure and role into small groups of systems. I no longer use puppet however. The price was much higher when we switched, and the markdown language wasn't as nice. YAML FL

Key Insights

Do you think Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, Harp

Likelihood to Recommend

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for ensuring a consistent endpoint via code. Our typical use case is to ensure our corporate baseline is actually in effect. This would also apply to federal security requirements, like DFARS, NIST frameworks, or DoD STIGs. It does not do well in provisioning systems, but it is not designed to. It is interesting to see the integration with tooling like Terraform.

Ansible Feature Ratings

Comments

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform - Not instantaneous but still impressive

Software Version

Modules Used