Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

I use the solution for all kinds of automation, network automation, compliance security, software installation, and software configuration. I started using the solution as a configuration management tool, and now I also use it for automation. I also use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform within the CMP platform Morpheus.

The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation.

The solution should add a nice self-service portal.

The standard single-node installation is easy. When you have a protection grade installed, and the customer wants DR, it creates a problem. For example, if you have the database built in, but the customer wants to use RDS, you have to tweak it. Then, you have to use the governance policies and everything accompanying them. Some customization takes place, but overall, it's easy if vendors use a straightforward method.

I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for many years.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a very stable solution. I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform an eight out of ten for stability.

Around 10 users use the solution in our organization, a presales and sales company. Around 1,000 users used the solution in my previous organization.

I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is not it's not hard. The steps to install the solution seem to be easy.

Users have to pay a per-node cost of around $ 100 per node. The solution's pricing depends upon the volume.

Users have to lay out how they want to build the solution. They should first build smaller job templates and then add them together to build workflow job templates.

Overall, I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten.

We use the solution for Linux patching automation. Currently, we are using the solution for patching normal configuration-related work. However, we also plan to use it for the provisioning of the servers.

The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.

The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a scalable solution. Around 300 to 400 users are using the solution in our organization.

The solution’s technical support is very good.

The solution’s initial setup is very easy.

The solution can be deployed within a day if you have all the resources. To deploy the solution, you need to check if you have a proper infrastructure and everything in place.

Users with the right environment, like Linux, should go for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. With the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we don't have to do manual things, increasing our efficiency. The solution helps us complete our complex work very easily, increasing efficiency.

Overall, I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform ten out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for network configuration pushes. We use scripts from Ansible to push configurations to specific devices such as routers.

The best features are the orchestration and flexibility of the solution.

It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well.

I've been working with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for a year.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable.

I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten.

It's a scalable solution. The capacity of the single instance is quite enough to hold up an enterprise. From a resilience perspective, you have to have a cluster that actually holds the whole thing.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate scalability at seven.

I would rate technical support at nine out of ten.

Positive

Once all of the components are in place, there are no issues with the initial setup. I would rate the initial deployment process at seven out of ten.

The deployment can take two days to a week depending on the requirements and resources available.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an expensive solution. There may be additional fees to use advanced features.

I would highly recommend Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, especially to organizations that are moving toward a cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Overall, I would rate this solution at seven on a scale from one to ten.

My use cases with Ansible include configuring network devices. That is what I used it for when I was first learning Ansible. I then automated PKI (public key infrastructure) compliance. That particular domain has different servers and I developed an automation solution, using Ansible, to automate the configuration of the PKI servers. And for the last eight or nine months, I have been working on automating cloud solutions, such as deploying services or upgrading or migrating to a specific version of a product.

I am working on a client network, and that client also has clients who are hiring our client for hosted services, such as websites or internal applications for their employees or for their end-users. All the database-related activities and operations are being handled by our client. What I am doing, in that context, has to do with patches. There are patch releases, or bundles, or package upgrades, but the developers of those packages can't go and directly upgrade the particular sites of every customer. So we have developed an automation solution for them, using Ansible, that can directly trigger these processes. They can point out that "this is the package," and our automation in the backend, using Ansible, takes care of it.

It's a tool to automate different domains and Ansible can reduce human efforts for two domains in particular. One is DevOps and the other is network automation.

It's a total automation tool. Where you might need 100 employees to do a certain type of work manually, by developing Ansible modules, that type of work can be done by one employee. It just requires a simple SSH to the target nodes and then you can do whatever you want.

We had a scenario, the public key infrastructure project, in which there were multiple components. Some of my colleagues had automated some domains, such as a firewall domain. We then needed to integrate components, the firewall servers and the PKI servers, so that they could communicate with each other, and for security purposes. Ansible helped with that.

When you compare a process done by Ansible with human effort, there is a large time-reduction ratio. In a scenario involving networking, if it is done manually, the human effort will involve logging in to the system, entering user credentials, installing software, and configuring it to make the system ready. If there are 100 such systems, we would need to do the same process to all 100 systems, one by one. Whereas with Ansible, you just need to configure the IP addresses of those systems and, with one click, your job is done.

And when we integrate Ansible with a CI/CD tool, like Jenkins or Bitbucket, that reduces service deployment time by more than one hour. Also, we have site deployment where we require multiple servers. For example, when we have a database server, it needs many other components as well. When we deploy all those services manually, using a UI or a console in the cloud, it takes more than 10 hours to deploy one site. With Ansible, we automate that task once and it can do it in an hour, and the site will be provisioned successfully.

One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything.

If you are good at Python and willing to customize Ansible modules, you can develop Ansible modules and, at one go, you can automate whatever you want.

When I started learning Ansible, I didn't know Python or any other programming language. But even so, I was easily able to understand what Ansible is doing and how I should write a playbook so that Ansible executes its tasks properly and the results are met, per my requirements. It's a simple English language and YAML script. Even folks with a non-IT background can write Ansible playbooks.

I have also been using Ansible Tower for about six months. It is nothing but a GUI version of, or experience with, Ansible. Ansible itself is a simple CLI tool, but with Ansible Tower there is a GUI, similar to Windows and Linux. There are a number of Ansible Tower servers, so if you want to run playbooks on multiple systems or you want to run multiple playbooks at the same time, you can do so using Ansible Tower. It is very dynamic. It's very easy to use. Even a non-IT employee or a non-IT student can understand Ansible Tower. The UI is very simple. Moreover, it has LDAP, Active Directory, and many other integrations, by default.

Suppose you have set something up, that you have pushed some code to the repo. Even your colleagues can test it using Ansible Tower. Or suppose I have run an Ansible Tower job and I am facing an issue with it. I can give a colleague the job ID and ask them to have a look and help me resolve it. That type of process is very easy, as Ansible Tower is like a common infra for employees to work together. 

Ansible Tower provides a central solution for automation. For example, in the previous project I worked on, we were automating some domains. Then we provided the sandbox URLs to the client for them to test whether the code the vendor had provided was working properly. They were able to run it in different ways with Ansible Tower. They used the Ansible Tower jobs with which we tested things for reference. Ansible Tower is a kind of UI dashboard for Ansible end-users. That is an added advantage of Ansible Tower: Whatever Tower jobs you have run are saved in Ansible Tower.

The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that.

I have been using Ansible for approximately one and a half years.

I believe no other tool can match the stability of Ansible. It is an agentless tool; it is SSH. Other comparable tools, like Puppet, Salt, and Chef, all require some kind of agent on the target node. Ansible only requires a Python dependency, which is very common in any operating system.

It's very scalable. If there were a graph showing scalability, Ansible would be at the peak on that graph.

I have not used Red Hat's technical support specifically for Ansible, but when learning Ansible I used their partner program and I felt it was the best.

When I started in automation, Ansible was the first tool I used.

The initial setup of Ansible is very straightforward. There are no dependencies. You just run a simple, single line command and your Ansible is ready. It hardly takes two minutes.

If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server.

Apart from the fact that Ansible is agentless and open source, it's the best because you only require an IP and the credentials of any target server, and half of your work is done.

Ansible is an open-source tool, so it can be integrated with any of the cloud services, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, very easily.

Based on my experience, I would suggest that anyone starting out with Ansible be familiar with SSH commands and Linux administration. That should be more than enough for Ansible beginners.

So far, the main thing we've been doing with it is using it to automate our monthly patching of servers. Since we have the whole inventory, we can patch this project's servers. We can use the exclude, exclude others, and, in one hour, do a patch that would take people one night to do.

Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite.

I've been doing patching from the command line, but for other people, it's nice to have the Dashboard where they can see it, have it report to our ELK stack. It's far more convenient, and we can trigger it with API and schedules, which is better than doing it with a whole bunch of scripts.

• I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together.
• The API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible.

On the Dashboard, when you view a template run, it shows all the output. There is a search filter, but it would be nice to able to select one server in that run and then see all that output from just that one server, instead of having to do the search on that one server and find the results. It would be nice to just be able to view per-server. Sometimes the server has some problems that we're going to find in some places. It would be nice not to have to search for them.

We haven't had any issues with its stability or with bugs, so far.

I think it will meet our needs going forward. We're going to put, not a whole lot of servers, just 3,000 servers, and that's going to be spread out. We're going to do an HA Tower. Right now, we're only doing 350 servers for our trial runs. We haven't had any problems with that, we just keep them all up at once.

I actually haven't had to contact tech support on any issues. My colleagues have worked with them for OpenShift, but for Tower, we haven't had a reason yet.

I felt the setup was really straightforward. The set up is with the Ansible Playbook. I just skimmed through that and I found that it does everything I need. And then I just ran it.

I did an upgrade two weeks ago. That was simple: Download the new one, run it. I did a back up before, just in case, but everything went smoothly. No problems.

Puppet is the main configuration management we have right now. The goal is that Ansible will do all the administration and deployment, and do all things with a baseline, to meet our standards. Then Puppet is going to be taking care of a lot of the rest of the configuration for all the different projects.

We primarily use it for network automation and security or CVE resolution.

We save thousands of hours a year doing security updates and configuration updates. We save our administrator's time by pushing updates. It is a one-click solution, and all they have to do now is pull down whatever they need for their configs. It saves about 4,000 man hours a year.

If you imagine Tier 1, 2, and 3 administrators, I am sitting more at the Tier 3 level. We are able to push out more complicated configurations. We can do just an SSH push to thousands of devices. It saves the time of our administrators from having to go into the console of every device. They do not have to SSH into every device and manually type in those configs. We can resolve security issues within a matter of minutes rather than days.

You have the initial big push to get Ansible set up and running in the environment, but once it is there, any tweaks or changes involve just edits to the code base, and you are good to go. It is not at all intensive.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has not reduced the training required to learn how to automate things. We are starting from scratch, so there is always going to be a learning curve associated with it. The more you peel that onion, the more involved it gets, and the more you have to learn about it.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps connect teams, such as developers, operations, or security so that they can automate together. It is hard to get anything done if all of those players are not talking. Knowledge bases are not siloed anymore. Previously, we did not have a cross-talk or sharing of information. Now that we have the platform, we have to share knowledge back and forth where we are pushing an update and they are telling us what is broken. There is constant feedback. There is a good feedback loop.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has helped to reduce the time we spend on low-value or repetitive tasks. It is hard to quantify the time savings because of the mass scale at which we use it, but it would be within thousands of man hours a year.

My guess is that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has saved us costs, but I am not in a position to see those numbers.

When you have an enterprise-level number of network devices, the ability to quickly push out security updates to thousands of devices is the biggest thing.

At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue.

I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for the last eight months. 

It is pretty good. Usually, if we have any issues, they are user-induced. When Ansible goes down or there is an issue like that, it is usually something we have done at the backend rather than Ansible itself.

It is very scalable. The way we use it is that we tie it in with another app to touch all of our devices and to deploy any configurations or whatever we need to push. Our code base sits on Git, and then we use another company for monitoring our devices. With one tower, or two for redundancy, we are able to push to more than 5,000 devices.

It has been good so far. There have been a few cases for which we reached out to them to get some help. I have not interacted with them personally, but I have heard good things. I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have not used any similar solution.

I was not there when we set it up. In terms of the deployment model, we still have one that is in the VM, and we are also using the containerized version. It is still Ansible Tower.

It has saved us thousands of man hours.

I was not there when we set it up. We have been using it for about four years. I am not sure about what happened before then.

I would rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is mostly automation. In technical terms, the solution uses a playbook. The playbooks contain code. If you have written all the code in the playbook, you just execute that code. You can automate depending on the environment.

The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful.

It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly for customers who aren't skilled in coding and don't know how to use the playbook's code. If we have many customers and the modules already exist, the user can just plug and play.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We don't have many issues with stability, so I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. We have two customers using the solution.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is complex, and OpenShift would be much easier. It took a week to deploy the solution. When deploying the solution, you must download the installer and install the solution on the server.

It requires two engineers for maintenance and deployment.

Customers need to pay yearly for the license. The pricing is acceptable. It is not expensive.

If you know the basics of coding for you to write the playbook's code, and if you have a midrange environment with up to 1,000 servers, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good option to automate daily tasks.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We have a lot of Red Hat servers in our data center environment, so we use this solution to manage the configuration, deploy and push configuration management. In addition, we use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate deployment tasks.

We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers. It is a configuration management tool, so we can easily manage our consistent configuration course over different Red Hat or Linux servers. We have not used Windows recently and are using only Linux now.

We like the GUI-based interface for the tower. Before, we only had a command-line interface to run all the Ansible tasks. Now, the Ansible tower provides the complete GUI functionality to run, manage, and create the templates and the Ansible jobs. This includes the code and YAML file we can create. The GUI interface is the added advantage of this solution, including some integration with the different plugins.

It should support more integration with different products. For example, it is for network security automation, and with the VMware product, they don't have an integration for NFTX right now. So they should include this integration capability so we can automate more tasks with this solution.

We have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform since 2021, and we are using version 3.2. It is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution and is based on your node license. We are using more than 400 servers right now, and it requires one senior system engineer for maintenance and deployment. We plan to increase the usage using Windows automation.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

We used a Puppet configuration in the past. We staged with Puppet and then moved to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The initial setup and deployment were easy, but the first two days of operations were a bit complex. We completed the deployment in-house.

There is a return on investment as a technical person. It has saved time and effort in maintaining the deployment environment. So on the technical side, it's saved lots of time and effort on the configuration.

I believe the cost per node basis is around $125 per node.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, for the deployment, I would suggest working on inventory first. They should also consider their use cases and which workflow they want to implement. In the next release, they should have VMware tight interrogation.