Ansible

Kerberos is often the preferred authentication method for managing Windows servers in a domain environment. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has allowed customers to leverage Kerberos authentication for a number of years now. So why revisit this subject? 

Overview When we get into the nuts and bolts of implementing a disaster recovery (DR) plan, an important step is to evaluate the tech stack that’s hosting the critical applications. The techstack oftentimes determines the order of ... [More] operations and execution needed to effect the DR. Most organizations have the following tech stack pattern for their data centers: [Less]

As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat ... [More] partners. Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.   [Less]

Since we announced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview at AnsibleFest last October, we have been working with a number of technology partners to provide integrated offerings via Ansible Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible. We ... [More] know that partner integrations are an important source of event intelligence that can be used to create full end-to-end event-driven automation across your Day 2 operations.   [Less]

As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat partners. ... [More] Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. If you are new to Event-Driven Ansible, check out the developer preview blog I wrote last fall to learn the basics, and you may also be interested in this video on Ansible Rulebooks, as well as others in this playlist. Transform your work with Event-Driven Ansible For many IT teams, there is too much work to do and not enough time to get it all done. Event-Driven Ansible can help your team work smarter, not harder. How often are you doing routine tasks that get in the way of key priorities? How often are you needing to "drop everything" to respond to a ticket enrichment request or handle a user administration issue? Have you had to wake up at night to remediate an issue? How often are you adjusting applications and underlying technologies to support fluctuating workloads? You will be happy to know there is a better way, and it is event-driven automation. Many pieces of recurring operational logic and processes can be automated by capturing them in Ansible Rulebooks, including issue remediation, fact gathering for service tickets, user administration tasks, and many more. But what are Ansible Rulebooks? Based on YAML, they are the basis of Event-Driven Ansible and contain conditional "if-this-then-that" logic. Event-Driven Ansible can also be used with scalability logic, or using rulebooks to codify scalability actions for rapid and seamless response, such as adding capacity or adjusting buffer pool size when an application or workload calls for it, or scaling out hybrid-cloud solutions when certain conditions are met, and so on. Event-driven patterns of automation make it faster to act on recurring events and also provide a simple way of distributing operational or scalability knowledge as an easy to read and verifiable structure. Event-Driven Ansible is accessible enough to be used by IT domain experts to solve a range of needs across use cases including infrastructure, networking, security, cloud and others. When your organization adopts event-driven automation techniques, your entire team can execute in a consistent and accurate way. You gain new levels of efficiency and can better focus on the innovations that give your business an edge. New features and enhancements What can you expect from Event-Driven Ansible as part of this release? Several new components and features have been added. These include: Event-Driven Ansible controller, which enables orchestration of multiple rulebooks and provides a single interface to manage and audit all responses across all event sources. These event sources are often third party monitoring and observability tools, but can be any source that provides intelligence about your IT environment. Integration with automation controller in Ansible Automation Platform, which allows you to call existing workflows that you’ve already built using the run_job_template action, thus extending existing, trusted automation into event-driven automation scenarios. This is an optional way to specify actions from within rulebooks. You can also call an existing Ansible Playbook within your rulebooks, if you prefer. Event throttling, which allows you to handle "event storms" using either a reactive approach with the once_within condition or a passive approach with the once_after condition. This allows greater control over when and how actions are executed in response to many events. The Event-Driven Ansible controller also allows default throttling mechanisms that limit scenarios which may result in a greater number of actions than anticipated. Event-Driven Ansible ecosystem integrations An ecosystem of Ansible Content Collections is important for Event-Driven Ansible because it works on the intelligence of changing IT conditions that come from event sources such as third party monitoring and observability tools. Ansible Content Collections are a variety of assets that help you jumpstart new automation projects. In the Event-Driven Ansible case, these assets typically are source plug-ins and rulebooks, but may also include other types of useful content. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections are supported by Red Hat and/or partners and typically focus on the "how-to" of some type of automation. Ansible validated content focuses more on "what-to-do" scenarios, including best practices. There has been extensive work done across the Event-Driven Ansible ecosystem in terms of new content, by both the community and third party Red Hat partners. The following is an overview of the work that has been done and what is to come: Certified and validated content The initial list of partners who are or will be certifying or validating content includes: Cisco ThousandEyes, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM, Palo Alto Networks, and Zabbix and there are more to come. Red Hat has also developed key integrations including Apache Kafka, webhooks, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat OpenShift, Cisco NX-OS and Model-Driven Telemetry, AWS and more. Refer to the image below. More integrations are coming soon, including ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and others. Certified Content for Event-Driven Ansible generally is certified event source plugins, written in python, which connect an event source to Ansible Rulebooks. Validated Content for Event-Driven Ansible is generally Ansible Rulebooks which have been validated and contains best practices for common use cases. Community- and custom-developed content Community and custom content is available either upstream or through private customer sources. Community-developed integrations have included gcp pubsub and syslogd, among others. Whether you have homegrown monitoring tools or need a specific solution immediately, you can build your own plug-ins for Event-Driven Ansible. Once you build your plug-in, consider whether this can be contributed to the Ansible community. Getting Involved with Event-Driven Ansible Ready to start exploring Event-Driven Ansible? There are a number of ways to do this. Visit Red Hat's Event-Driven Ansible page where you will find a series of free, self-paced interactive labs, information and analyst research. You can also join a getting started with Event-Driven Ansiblewebinar on June 20, 2023. Additional resources Press release: Red Hat Accelerates IT Automation with Event-Driven Ansible Web page: Event-Driven Ansible Video: Creating Ansible Rulebooks and Event-Driven Ansible playlist Event-Driven Ansible webinar, June 20, 2023 Event-Driven Ansible self paced labs 451 Research paper: The Impact of Event-Driven Automation Event-driven automation e-book [Less]

New year, new role, new strategy…2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best demonstrate to my ... [More] customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way—a tool—that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down. [Less]

YOU are the community New year, new role, new strategy...2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best ... [More] demonstrate to my customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way---a tool---that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down. Many of you have stories just like mine. You are seeking out a way to simplify your daily tasks, so you can focus on the business. Just like me, you have decided that Ansible is the tool to do it. Before I started in this new role, I did some reflecting on my experience as part of the community. I have so many encouraging, positive, and fun stories I could share. Our community is truly amazing. The level of collaboration and desire to help are out of this world. Even with all those positive vibes, at times I would question whether or not I was giving back on the appropriate level.  Looking back now, I understand better the dynamics of a community and understand that those of us who are consumers are just as valuable as the contributors. This realization sparked some further ideas about inclusiveness---the feeling of truly belonging. I asked myself the questions "Who makes up our community?" and "Do they know they are a pivotal part of the community?" Hence the title of our blog today, YOU are the community. Each and every one of us who love and use Ansible are an integral part of the community, and I'd like to share a vision for our shared future.  That vision consists of: A strong and focused mission Rally the community around desired work streams by creating a centralized space to attract more community involvement and accelerate their impact. Cultivation of inclusiveness Harvest the wide knowledge of the community to further create an environment of independence and assist in crafting ways of working that resolve disagreements and dissolve roadblocks quickly. Inspiration, creativity, and collaboration Encourage sustained focus and shared problem-solving, remove boundaries, and support all ideas (no idea is too impossible). An understanding that failure is not fatal Try new approaches, create new capabilities, and identify inflection points quickly---then pivot when needed. More frequent recognition of success Call out, reward, and celebrate the wins of the community members often. We formed the strategy for the community from these tenets...big shout out to Greg Sutcliffe and Carol Chen for leading that charge. This strategy will help all of us stay focused to deliver the capabilities needed to uphold the vision. Over the next months, expect to see new tooling introduced to the community to foster better collaboration, increase overall upstream participation, and put the well-deserved spotlight on those of you who are doing great work on a daily basis.  While these capabilities are being put in place, it feels like a good time to remind each of you that your voice matters. We absolutely need and want you to have a seat at the table. Some of you may be asking yourself "How can I help?" or may even be doubting if you are actually part of the community. So I want to debunk any doubts early, right here...right now. YOU are the community...our community consists of many different personas, such as contributors, users (which very much includes customers), partners and vendors. Each persona brings different value. Contributors You know who you are. These are our keyboard warriors who are actively contributing to any of the many Ansible-focused projects. Whether it is a simple PR to suggest better execution output or something very complex like fixing a Core runtime error, you are all contributors. Learn more about becoming a contributor. Users I was, and still very much am, in this category. There is no shame in that at all! For those of us who are using Ansible on a daily basis or rely heavily on it to solve some sort of business need, we are Ansible users. There is so much value in what users can offer to a contributor and vice versa. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform users are also very much part of the active user community. Please know this, and I challenge you to connect with the contributors in the community. I think you will find a lot of benefit in that as you both are working through complex automation use cases. Learn how you can help. Partners and vendors These are our long-standing and foundational members of the community. They have brought multiple levels of much-needed integration into the Ansible project. They also assist with customers to help drive automation adoption---and truly innovate. To our partners and vendors: your participation in the community brings a huge impact to the current community, and you open the pathway for those joining us in the future.  No matter which category you count yourself in, know that YOU are part of the Ansible community. Thank you for helping make Ansible what it is. I can't wait to see what the rest of 2023 has in store for all of us. Also, be sure to subscribe to the Bullhorn for live updates and our progress on developing a new community web presence. No matter what, know that we are all in this together. Let's "Automate as One."  [Less]

Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023 As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in ... [More] a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what's coming in IT automation. Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases by helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. Organizations are looking to extend a consistent automation experience across cloud, datacenter, and edge with the ability to scale in heterogeneous environments. Red Hat Ansible provides a common platform where organizations can build, run, and manage the entirety of their highly distributed systems, even to remote locations where network connectivity may be intermittent. Because we understand how important edge automation is to teams looking to automate their entire IT landscape with a single platform, we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit: Success at the edge starts with automation Bringing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to the industrial edge Red Hat: Modernizing the industrial manufacturing world How to gain a sharper business edge at UPS scale Building the next-generation Rail Server at the edge with Swiss Federal Railway Streamlining edge operations with Ansible: An automation case study Accelerating retail Day 2 operations with new Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible Automation capabilities Automating application delivery at the edge Network and security automation at the edge AI in manufacturing: Red Hat and Intel build a foundation for production-ready AI/ML environments 5G and edge: Open networks transform industries Deploy any workload on Red Hat Device Edge Do you have questions about edge automation with Ansible? Bring them to AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit, and take advantage of the experts at the Ansible booth, the Edge booth, and the Ask the Expert area. We will also be running different labs throughout the event, so this is the perfect opportunity to get hands-on experience while being able to ask questions in real time to Ansible experts. These labs include: Writing your first Ansible Playbook Security-focused capabilities for edge device management Event-Driven Ansible and NetOps automation Advanced capabilities of automation controller in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Please refer to the session catalog for the most up to date room assignments; sessions subject to change. Looking for more edge automation content? We have you covered. Check out these resources to learn more about how network automation with Ansible can help you: Experience self-paced interactive hands-on labs with Ansible Automation Platform Register for AnsibleFest at Red Hat Summit Read IDC paper: Edge growth drives need for automating the last mile Check out the Edge Automation playlist on YouTube [Less]