Ansible

By Matthew Jones, Chief Architect, Ansible Automation at Red Hat Back in 2013, a small team of engineers worked for over a year to make the first commercial release of Ansible Tower (before we expanded and evolved to Ansible Automation Platform) and ... [More] during that time we put down the foundation of an application that I’m immensely proud of. We, the original architects of Tower, were trying to find the best way to create a system that would allow running Ansible at scale for hundreds of thousands of servers. We wanted there to be a way to not just manage those servers but store the results of that automation and provide auditability and traceability. It needed to make Ansible functional for large teams and it succeeded. Today, we’re not just talking about hundreds of thousands. We’re thinking in the millions and tens of millions, we’re managing automation for some of the largest IT organizations in the world. And we’re not just managing servers. In the intervening years we’ve been automating containers, cloud platforms, network devices, storage, IoT devices and PLCs (among other things). One of the main challenges that we’re facing is that some of the architectural decisions we made 10 years ago are still with us. We have a monolithic system that performs its job extremely well but can be very challenging to expand with new capabilities. Read more… (6 min remaining to read) [Less]

As the technology landscape continues to evolve, the latest release of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for amazon.aws introduces a suite of powerful modules that redefine the boundaries of automation within Amazon Web ... [More] Services (AWS) while redefining how organizations approach security deployments and seamless migrations within the AWS ecosystem. [Less]

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Ansible Content Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.

Integrating observability tools with automation is paramount in the realm of modern IT operations, as it fosters a symbiotic relationship between visibility and efficiency. Observability tools provide deep insights into the performance ... [More] , health, and behavior of complex systems, enabling organizations to proactively identify and rectify issues before they escalate.  [Less]

Over time, application owners find themselves compelled to continuously refine their applications and the underlying infrastructure to enhance the products they deliver, whether to internal or external customers. These modifications ... [More] inevitably lead to changes in the configuration of both applications and infrastructure. While some of these changes may be benign, others can unintentionally steer the systems away from their securely configured state, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "configuration drift." Left unaddressed, the extent of this drift can introduce substantial risks to the organization. [Less]

Infrastructure automation is an area where systems administrators and  IT operations teams can see some of the biggest benefits from automation, including time savings, reducing tedious manual work, and improving the overall health of their ... [More] systems. In this blog, I've identified the top 5 infrastructure automation use cases for Ansible Automation Platform that you can deploy in your own environment, and I've incorporated new capabilities like Event-Driven Ansible to make managing your infrastructure even easier.  [Less]

The use of Event-Driven Ansible to enable fact gathering from events is considered a “Getting Started” type of use case, but it can be extremely powerful. This use case is simple and it is what we consider a “Read Only” type of action ... [More] , meaning that we are not making any changes, but we are using the event to trigger a fact gathering process which we can later publish to the IT Service Management system.  [Less]

CVE-2023-20198 

This blog is co-authored by Tomas Znamenacek and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad

Event-Driven Ansible became generally available in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. As part of the release, Red Hat Insights and Ansible teams collaborated to implement and certify a Red Hat Insights collection integrating Insights events as ... [More] a source of events for Ansible Automation Platform. This provides a consistent way to receive and handle events triggered from Insights to drive and track automation within the Ansible Automation Platform. The collection is available for installation on Ansible automation hub. [Less]