Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is Red Hat’s enterprise IT automation solution that includes everything needed to build, deploy, and manage end-to-end automation at scale. Ansible Automation Platform makes it possible for users across an organization to create, test, and manage automation content through a powerful and agentless framework. It is a more secure, stable, and flexible foundation for deploying end-to-end automation solutions, from IT processes, to hybrid cloud, to the edge.
Automating at scale requires a top-down strategy that includes investments in time, technology, and people. Make the most of that investment with Ansible Automation Platform, then reap the benefits as you accelerate, orchestrate, and innovate with automation.
Features and benefits
- Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations adopt a culture of collaborative automation by delivering a consistent experience everywhere, based on features tailored to the needs of the entire IT team. With Ansible Automation Platform:
- IT managers and architects can more easily expand automation across the enterprise, while managing automation policy and governance with the automation services catalog and getting real-time reporting across the entire stack with Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform.
- Developers retain the freedom to build, without the operational overhead of maintaining many tools and frameworks. Execution environments deliver a consistent container-like experience for building and scaling automation, with new tooling included to help build and manage them. Ansible Content Collections offer prebuilt automation content from more than 100 certified partners, with solutions available for nearly every use case.
- Administrators and operators have powerful tools in the automation controller and automation hub to manage and share automation projects more efficiently, with a common language and broadly accessible mix of command line interfaces (CLIs), graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and text-based user interfaces (TUI) across endpoints.
- Your organization can tackle automation challenges from network and security automation, to cloud infrastructure provisioning, to configuration management, to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), containers, and beyond.
| Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform overview | |
| Platform component | Uses and benefits |
| Ansible Core | Ansible Automation Platform is aligned with the global community behind the Ansible project, with added foundational capabilities and assurance from Red Hat that help your business comfortably adopt organization-wide automation at any scale. |
| Automation controller | The control plane for Ansible Automation Platform is called automation controller (renaming Ansible Tower). It includes a user interface (UI), role-based access control (RBAC), workflows, and CI/CD for helping your team scale. Automation controller helps standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited. Manage inventory, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate into reporting, all from a centralized user interface and RESTful application programming interface (API). |
| Automation execution environments | Packaged as containers, automation execution environments (which replace Ansible Engine) are defined, consistent, and portable environments for executing Ansible playbooks and roles. Execution environments offer a simple, flexible way to build, reuse, and scale automation content. |
| Automation mesh | Automation mesh provides a simple, flexible and reliable way to scale automation of large inventories across diverse network topologies, platforms and teams. Automation mesh facilitates resilience and fault tolerance, while providing enhanced security to standardize and normalize automation across your entire IT estate. |
| Ansible Content Collections | Ansible Content Collections make it easier for Ansible content creators and developers to get automation up and running faster. Certified Ansible Content Collections are backed by Red Hat and a robust partner ecosystem. They are trusted, flexible automation content building blocks for a variety of use cases. |
| Automation hub | Automation hub provides a place for Ansible Automation Platform customers to quickly find, use, and extend content that is supported by Red Hat and its technology partners, for additional reassurance for the most demanding environments. Private automation hub is also available, and offers customers a container image repository of their execution environments as an on-premise instance of automation hub. |
| Ansible content tools | Ansible Automation Platform 2 includes two new tools designed to help make building and deploying execution environments a more seamless creation experience. Additional Ansible content tools will be included in future platform releases. Execution environment builder (ansible-builder) is a command line tool that helps build Ansible environments into containers using podman. It lets automation creators and operators build custom execution environments with the exact Ansible content needed for their automation. Automation content navigator (ansible-navigator) provides a top-level platform interface (via CLI or TUI) for Ansible automation creators. It provides a more cohesive, consistent, and predictable top-level automation content creation experience designed to help the enterprise Ansible developer. |
| Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform | Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform allows architects to track and troubleshoot job success and measure how teams are coordinating automation processes across IT domains. It also helps operators and administrators keep Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform running efficiently and optimally, pinpoint where specific jobs are failing, and report on automation projects across end-to-end infrastructure. |
| Automation services catalog | Automation services catalog is a means for users to manage, provision, and retire automation resources, for modeling and delivery made easy. It gives automation creators and business users self-service access across physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments, making it easier to get automation projects running. It simultaneously gives enterprise and line of business automation users the governance they need to meet compliance and procurement requirements. |
Ansible Automation Platform brings together the best of on-premise automation innovation, while including hosted services that can be accessed alongside other Red Hat cloud services on the hybrid cloud console. No matter where you are on your enterprise automation journey, Ansible Automation Platform is designed to help you:
- Accelerate. Get started faster by combining the power of Ansible’s massive open source community and prebuilt content collections of the most-used Ansible roles and modules. Codify your infrastructure and share across teams and individuals where you are already running deployments, whether on-premise or in the cloud.
- Orchestrate. Easily transfer your automation into multiple domains and across different use cases.
Stakeholders across developer, operator, and line-of-business teams can now engage with Ansible Automation Platform in ways that work best for them and make sense for their individual roles without slowing development time.
- Innovate. Take your automation even further with analytics, policy and governance, and content management. Ansible Automation Platform tools make day-to-day life more efficient, allowing you to solve problems once and share the results with everyone.
Robust IT ecosystem support
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform supports a variety of platforms across servers, clouds, networks, containers, and more to meet you where you are in your automation journey.
- Operating systems and virtualization: Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Windows and Windows Server, VMware
- Networks: Arista, Cisco, F5, Infoblox, Juniper, Dell/EMC, Aruba, A10 and more
- Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform
- DevOps tools: Atlassian, Check Point, CyberArk, Datadog, IBM, Splunk
- Security: Cisco ASA, Check Point, CyberArk, Fortinet, IBM Resilient and Qradar
- IT Service Management: ServiceNow
