Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Benefits

DE
Linux Platform System Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour.

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Alex Kabugo - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Wipro Limited

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good choice when you have different distribution platforms. If you have an infrastructure with Ubuntu, VPN, and Red Hat distributions, Ansible can integrate these platforms through a small inventory file, such as a custom image or file.

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SN
Lead Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The solution has improved our productivity and functionality. The automations we have done for patching save a lot of time and effort for many users. 

We always have plans to increase usage because we have automations in the pipeline for installations and patching. 

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Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
TE
Senior Systems Administrator at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center

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.

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AANKITGUPTAA - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at Pi DATACENTERS

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.

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MC
DevOps Consultant at a government with 501-1,000 employees

Historically, lots of things had to be orchestrated manually. There weren't any great tools to do configuration management across multiple nodes. IT servers were physical but then moved into virtual, and with that change came the need to manage more and more nodes. It became quite time-consuming, and employing people to manage hundreds or thousands of servers wasn't really a great solution. Ansible, as an orchestrator, has filled the gap. It allows you to manage an almost unlimited number of nodes with a single body. That has been a great improvement in the way organizations manage their estates.

In addition, we're able to configure or deliver something to our end nodes step-by-step. You can have dependencies, types of conditions, between steps. For example, if something isn't present or it's not happening on that node, you can skip steps and move to another one. This ability definitely helps. In the past, a lot of things had to be done manually or with a semi-manual script. Ansible automates those things. As long as you've got your playbook written up and tested correctly, you can run it with confidence against your production system.

Ansible also saves us time when it comes to service deployment, moves, and updates. If we consider the effort involved in writing playbooks, and the effort to deploy them, Ansible saves 80 to 90 percent when it comes to the time involved in these scenarios.

Another advantage is that Ansible enables collaboration across teams. We're transparent. Whatever we deliver needs to be backed by the code. That code lives in source control. Anybody who is capable and wants to could grab that code. Playbooks are an example. They could simply apply them against the target. This is a form of collaboration, where one person does something and another can grab it and use it. Obviously you need source control, but multiple people can work on a specific project together and can have influence on that project, providing updates, features, and bug fixes to the project.

We have certainly seen an improvement in automation. With Ansible, you can pretty much automate everything. You work on a desired state. And we have been able to apply current, modern security standards to the estates. From a security perspective, our servers are now fully compliant with modern security standards. We are able to use Ansible to run some benchmarks against them to see if they're fully compliant.

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reviewer98623 - PeerSpot reviewer
Intern at a university with 1-10 employees

It brings a lot of time-saving.

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Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Administrator at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The Ansible automation platform helps us achieve our goals. It is easier to handle and easier to understand. We can learn it easily, and we can share it with colleagues also very easily.

New colleagues and new people can understand the solution very well, making it quick for onboarding. 

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PT
Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

We're realizing its benefits on a daily basis now. The biggest issue that we've had has been changing the way people work. We have a lot of people doing the work, and they all had a certain way of working. There were a certain set of tools that they used. We had to gradually migrate all of the tools that they were using to be more automated. There was a lot of code and a lot of tools on people's individual machines or shared drives. For example, User 1 had all of his applications and tools on his machine, and he might also have had some small scripts that he wrote personally on his machine. When User 2 came along, he didn't get to see what User 1 had because all of the scripts were on his machine. By automating more, we've put all of our code into a central repository so that everybody who is a member of that repository can see everyone's code. Nobody is siloed anymore. We have a lot more collaboration. There is a lot more progressive thinking in the way people are working. It is not where a bit of code is written for one specific purpose. It is always adaptable by just changing variables, etc.

It has effectively sped up everything from our sandpit environment to our full CI/CD process and our end deployment. Previously, we had to build everything manually in the sandpit. We had to build everything manually in the test environment, and we had to build everything manually in the production environment. Because we have environments that are matched all the way through, now, after we've built something in the sandpit, we can just promote that code. So, the copying of that code through various platforms has been eliminated with the use of Ansible and our repository system.

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Venek Otevrel - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Cloud Architect at T1 Solution, s.r.o.

We have around 25 people doing this same job. Before using this solution, we had more than 100 people for the same amount of work. This solution has definitely helped us to reduce and optimize our efforts.

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NS
Student at ARTH

It helps us to create an environment. I'm a student. As students, when we get into newer technologies, we can't share our infrastructure with each other, and it gets difficult to explain to everybody. For example, I want to tell my friend to do certain things so that his infrastructure is similar to mine. In such a case, I'll just create a playbook from Ansible, and I'll just share it with him. He will just run that playbook, and we both will have the same infrastructure. 

It doesn't require us to change our existing infrastructure in any way. We just need Ansible software on the managed host. So, it just needs to have Ansible. The host with which we are going to connect should have the Python interpreter installed, and nothing else. 

It saves time when it comes to service deployment, moves, or updates. We have created playbooks, which are very easy to create. They are scripts in Python. A playbook also acts as a documentary for you. You can refer to a playbook any time, and it definitely saves a lot of time. It gives very good results in a long run. You just have to invest time in creating the first playbook. After that, you just use it. While creating a playbook, you can specify keywords by using Ansible variables. For example, to launch an instance in AWS Cloud, I need to specify a name to it. If I need to launch two to three instances at once, I will create a variable for it and pass it externally through the Ansible playbook. Next time, you can change the keyword and run the playbook.

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MR
Senior Site Reliability Engineer

The solution helps us to have a standard configuration for all the virtual machines. It helps our virtual machines have the same configuration every time they restart. It also helps with automation.

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AG
Devops Engineer at Infosys Ltd

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.

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MI
Senior DevOps at RubiconMD

It saves time; it cut our configuration time. 

It is very easy to use, and there is less room for error. For exampe, if we had 10 servers, and we need to update a file on each server. So, you would have to go into every server and update the file manually, then sign out. You can mess up on the sixth one and have configuration issues. It is easier to use one server to create a playbook, then you just hit "push" and the playbook is distributed to all the servers.

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SR
Linux Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The improvement is going to come in that we are going to be able to maintain configuration management, through the use of both Puppet and Ansible. Currently, in a manual process, hands-on - that is what kills us. When we have a system administrator trying to do his job, that kills us every time. We have 2,500 servers and if a project comes to him, we have 15-minute time-outs. I don't like that. He'll go in there and he'll change it. And we can't control that and we don't know when it gets changed.

The hope is that we automate and then it's there, we know it's there. And then we'll use Puppet to come in at the back, and just maintain it. That is our plan.

If somebody tries to change something through Puppet, we're going to get reports. Ansible is going to be used on the front end, and if somebody comes up and says, "We need this patch pushed out. It's an urgent patch. It's high criticality. We need to do it now," we'll do it through Ansible. We'll write a Playbook or a module and just, boom, get it done.

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MJ
Senior Director Network Security at Oracle Corporation

We have done a lot of work to do automation. Previously, it wasn't in the DNA of Oracle at all. Ansible has brought a platform which has allowed us to automate a lot of services, not just server services, but network services as well.

This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together. We have integrations with some of our ticketing and monitoring systems, which allows work to start work happening.

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BW
Systems Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

There is some overhead in setting up the initial playbooks, but it now takes less time to set up 10 servers than it did to configure one in the past. Also, the setup is consistent because there is not the concern that someone forgot to copy/paste a config line or run another command. Whatever is in the playbook gets done.

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AB
Senior Security Engineer at Mindpoint

For my client, it has improved a lot of the problems that we had. For example, with package management, I wrote a script in Bash to check all the different PHP versions in Red Hat. With Ansible, I can do it for all my systems at once, which is huge.

There are a lot of different, little nuances that I like about Ansible. The biggest is the checking and validating, since it makes sure our packages are properly patched. We are running the latest version (PHP, etc.) on our different packages and validating them.

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MK
Senior Systems at a government with 10,001+ employees

It's a catch all. We now have a central way of pushing out updates. As long as we have every name of all the hosts on the network that we want to patch on Linux primarily, we have it covered, from one person logging on and issuing the commands, then looking for the feedback from the servers.

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YS
Senior Data Architect at Crunchy Data

It has seamless integration because we are not using Ansible to manage our services. We are creating roles, and those roles configure servers. The way we design the role is we split into multiple roles and each role has its own action to perform. This helps a lot to design our overall architecture.

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AB
Systems Administrator at Main Street softworks

We were growing at the time. I was able to take the old build manifest and automate everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it. When it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was the same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went.

It helps me do a lot more. Where previously we had a couple of guys doing what I do, now it's just me.

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KumarP - PeerSpot reviewer
Risk Analyst at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Ansible has saved us lots of time. Previously, it took us much longer to deploy or make changes across systems. 

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SJ
Senior Software Developer at HCL Technologies

My team thinks it is easy to work with, especially when working with the nodes. When the nodes increase, from say five to 15, I don't have to do anything extra.

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SS
Senior Operations Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

In terms of staff or the amount of effort involved, Ansible is great. That Tower uses Ansible is amazing. Creating Playbooks takes less time. Tower has its own features. If there were more that would be great. But because Tower uses Ansible, it's not a lot of effort and we can get things done quickly.

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EG
Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

It allows people without a lot of knowledge or expertise in a CI/CD pipeline to deploy it other than knowing how to write code. It allows them to look at what someone else has done and easily read it, then copy and paste into their own if they're creating a new app. They can also utilize what is already there.

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FN
CEO/Founder at Zen Networks

Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps to provide predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production.

It is very hard to manage more than a hundred servers with redundant configurations manually. It is too prone to error and troubleshooting can easily become a nightmare. This is why it is very beneficial to use an automation platform like Ansible coupled with configuration management/versioning (Gtilab, Gogs) and some best practices around that.

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ES
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall-related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions. We've used Ansible even longer than that, organizationally, for web servers mainly. Some guys are doing some of the Kubernetes stuff, but I'm personally not involved with those modules.

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JG
Principal Engineer at CyberArk

We are a partner, but we also use it in-house. It drives all of our demonstrations. We've used Ansible community to be able to easily deploy and set up pipelines end-to-end in Dockers or containers. Therefore, we can have an easy to go, ready demonstration set up in less than five minutes. We can also have a customer go to our GitHub page and just be able to use Ansible to have it easily deployed, then we don't have to give them any more instructions, i.e., run this playbook and you'll be set up in no time.

Our sales engineers use it a lot in order to understand how the security works between Ansible and our own product, so they can better sell it. We have been lucky enough to have a great partnership with Red Hat, so we receive a lot of great feedback directly from their solutions architects. 

We are always getting together and sharing information. We will be training them on Conjur, and on Thursday, they have us being trained on Ansible. So, it's a great partnership.

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MA
Works at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Ansible makes it easy to maintain configuration across environments and to maintain and execute the code through playbooks. It has helped us reduce manpower costs.

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CB
Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It's going to help differentiate our services. It's something new that we're using internally, and our managed services, themselves, are new within Canada. It's something we're doing to help scale faster. Our company has an offering called through which we manage the subscriptions to various cloud providers for clients. We help them to automate that component.

We also offer another service to help customers connect to various clouds effectively, through VPNs to different clouds. A big piece of that is standardizing. If client A comes in, versus client B, we want to standardize that process and make it repeatable, so we're templating that as much as possible in Ansible.

Sometimes we'll combine various tools so we'll use Ansible on a native cloud formation. We're looking at Ansible as our key orchestration engine for the data model that we developed internally and to help pump that out.

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CS
Senior Network Engineer at ePlus Technology

It's helped in my department, or at least in my role, because I use it a lot. NTP is a big one. We just rolled out GPS-based NTP. Instead of spending several days going to each device and ripping out config and putting new config in, I just batched our branches, batched our data center, ran three jobs, and called it a day.

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CM
System Engineer at a tech vendor

I was the one who initially initiated Ansible Core and Tower within our department of the bank. I have actually been the Ansible evangelist, so I'm slowly migrating people from using batch scripts to using Ansible Playbooks. That has taken a little while but there has been an improvement in people using Ansible, and starting to automate things better, and people sharing code amongst the teams.

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DT
Software Engineer at Arista

From speed to deployment, it is much quicker. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations. So, if you are building a pipeline with Jenkins or some orchestration tool, it's much easier to write the playbook and plug it in via Tower than try to link it yourself. Thus, it is quick to production.

If you look at network as a infrastructure, NetOps, and the continuous integration, we are certainly able to plug something (like Tower) into the pipeline, which is a big benefit and also a value add.

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it_user573504 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps/Build Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

It has made software installation and updates much easier. Tasks including changing or checking configurations and files have been improved especially considering the big scope of servers.

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NA
Student at StarHub

Ansible automation has benefited our organization.

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it_user8784 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We can now go to a customer and deploy all software in a few minutes instead of hours. View full review »
LV
Co Founder at LIMESTONE NETWORKS INC

It has made our infrastructure more testable. We are able to build our infrastructure in CI, then are more confident in what we are deploying will work, not breaking everything.

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it_user870588 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at Huawei Technologies

We are still implementing it. I have used it in a very small environment (10 hosts), and it performed well.

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KR
Security Engineer at MindPoint Group, LLC

It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time.

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it_user516087 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Provision and configure from nothing on Amazon.

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it_user1028010 - PeerSpot reviewer
Automation Engineer at Fidelity National Information Services, Inc.

Saved time as well as helped support compliance and standards.

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Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.