Ansible

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 is the next generation automation platform from Red Hat’s trusted enterprise technology experts. With the release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.1, users now have access to the latest control plane – automation controller 4.1.

Network edge automation challenges  As organizations grow and expand geographi cally, they start extending their IT infrastructure into the distributed and far edge layers through opening new branch offices. 

As many of you know, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a highly flexible IT automation platform that can automate your Linux and Windows instances, your VMware private cloud, your AWS, Azure or Google public cloud, and even your ... [More] security infrastructure.  Today I want to write about one of my favorite use-cases; using Ansible Automation Platform for network automation. It provides easy, highly customizable automation for your routers and switches so you can automate them just like any other IT infrastructure. [Less]

Red Hat Ansible Tower (included in Ansible Automation Platform 1.x) used Python virtual environments to manage dependencies and implement consistent automation execution across multiple Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform instances. This method of managing dependencies came with its own set of limitations:

Red Hat Ansible Tower (included in Ansible Automation Platform 1.x) used Python virtual environments to manage dependencies and implement consistent automation execution across multiple Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform instances. This method of managing dependencies came with its own set of limitations:

Many people are familiar with the community version of Ansible, the command line automation tool, but I wanted to elaborate on how our enterprise offering, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and how it expands the possibilities of Ansible for our customers in Red Hat's most recent release.

Ansible Content Collections have become the new standard for distributing Ansible content (playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins). Collections have been fully supported since Ansible 2.9 and for the last 2 years, the Ansible community ... [More] has been on a journey to move to this new way of packaging and consuming Ansible content. With Ansible 2.9, Collections were optional, but as of 2.10 they are a requirement. The ability to be able to install and use Collections as needed is increasingly important. [Less]

Being able to dynamically scale infrastructure is no longer a nice-to-have - it is a requirement. The advent of cloud and container platforms have shifted the expectations in terms of consuming IT infrastructure and services. As a result ... [More] , any tool that is used to manage infrastructure needs to be able to handle this ever-changing landscape.  [Less]

Note: This blog refers to Red Hat Insights using Ansible Automation Platform 2.1. Automation controller is the control plane for Ansible Automation Platform, formerly known as Red Hat Ansible Tower. An indispensable but sometimes ... [More] overlooked tool included with an Ansible Automation Platform subscription is the cloud-based service, Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform. Insights is a suite of reporting and analytics tools to help you identify, troubleshoot, and resolve operational, business, and security issues across your entire ecosystem. You can also use Insights to track the ROI of your automation investment and plan future automation projects to prioritize your efforts where they will have the biggest impact on your business. Before you can start using Insights to better understand your automation estate and make data-driven decisions, you need to set up the flow of information from your enterprise into the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. [Less]

Use Case: Operational state assessment using ansible.utils collection In ansible.utils, there are a variety of plugins which we can use for operational state assessment of network devices. I overviewed the ansible.utils collection in ... [More] part one of this two part blog series. If you have not reviewed part one, I recommend you do so, since I will build on this information in this part two blog. We will see how the ansible.utils collection can be useful in operational state assessment as an example use case. [Less]