The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix. 

The infrastructure and user controls are much easier to use than BigFix. 

Community support is always available so it is easy to get direct information. There is a lot of basic, enterprise-level, and governance-level support. 

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• Ad-hoc commands
• Playbooks
• Setting up and deleting users
• Patching
• Using it for quick and dirty deployment of scripts.
  

The YAML syntax is easy to use, but it takes some getting used to. I feel like Microsoft Visual Studio helps with the YAML syntax, lining it up correctly. However, if you're doing it from the command line without actual spacing, that could be a little problematic. The new version of Visual Studio is quite helpful because Git is integrated with it. The YAML markdowns are also in place. My staff doesn't need special coding skills to use it.

We have multiple Playbooks to configure a server. We can break it up or make one main YAML script to push out all the individual dependencies.

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The role-based access control (RBAC) feature is the most valuable, especially when used with Azure Galaxy Infinity.

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I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes.

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The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless.

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The solution is very simple to use and we chose it for the simplicity. 

Being an Agent Plus makes our lives easier. 

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

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

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

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• 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.

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

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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.

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Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate. Managing a Windows or Microsoft estate via Ansible is a little bit different and I believe that requires the installation of some agents.

Another advantage is that Ansible did not require us to change our existing infrastructure in any way. This issue ties in with the SSH connectivity. You don't have to prepare any infrastructure to use Ansible. When you provision an operating system, that SSH remote connection is available. It's embedded in the operating system. That means you don't have to enable anything. All you have to do is make sure you can reach the nodes, either via SSH, passwordless authentication, or possibly other mechanisms. We've only been using SSH, and it does the job very well.

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The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature.

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We can automate a few host configurations using the product.

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The automation manager is very good and makes things easier for customers with multi-cloud platforms. 

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It is easy to manage. If we make a playbook, we do need to have some skills in scripting or skills for the AML file. However, once we do, we can easily handle the issue.

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Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable.

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It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left.

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One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks.

The language is very intuitive. The solution is easy to learn. The solution enables us to deliver incrementally. We are able to expand this facility by implementing more templates and using them digitally.

We are an international company, so we use this solution with a collaborative approach internationally. 

The solution enables us to enforce the same security settings, so it's quite easy to maintain. There can be human mistakes, which can make security unreliable, so that is why we prefer this security policy.

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Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible. 

Its dynamic inventory capability is very useful. For example, we are provisioning instances in AWS, and I want a particular name tag. My name tag is my instance, and I've been running a lot of instances in AWS Cloud. If I want, I can filter and configure all instances running with a specific name. I can also dynamically fetch IPs. What happens in the AWS cloud is that if you shut your operating system down, and you do some reboot and stuff like that, then you'll lose the public IP. Being able to dynamically fetch IP is the main capability that I like in Ansible.

It is very easy to use. Anybody who has studied computer science or is from the mathematical field can easily use Ansible. You just have to know how to do a certain task. For example, if you want to make some changes to your firewall and maybe set up a web server, you don't have to know all the commands with respect to different operating systems such as Linux and Windows. You don't need to know commands, and you just need to have a basic idea about how you want to do it. It is very easy to use. You just have to know how to do it.

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The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work.

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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.

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Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server.

It is very easy to grasp. Multiple users on my team can utilize it without me giving them a thorough tutorial. This has been helpful.

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The most valuable feature is the Playbooks and pushing them out.

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I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates. 

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With this solution, we're able to cover our client's needs. 

The automation is very good. The operational automation and DevOps are the most valuable features for us. 

It's easy to set up.

The solution can scale.

It's very stable. 

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The community support is broad with a lot of available plugins and modules. People have shared a lot of information about how to do things with the solution.

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The beauty of Ansible is the easy ramp-up to get started.  You really only need Python and SSH access. Configuration is generally done in YAML, which is easy to understand, and there is a progression from ad hoc tasks, to playbooks, then to roles, which means you can start with one server and continue building up to datacenters worth of servers with the same methodology. Also, shared by most configuration management tools, the idea of creating a desired state scales better than trying to specify procedural steps to set up new hosts. There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master).

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I like learning and challenging myself with it, finding out if there are different problems that we can automate. I always look to see if there is a community solution first on the Internet. By looking at what other people have done, I can see if I can try to emulate their work.

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I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver.

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1. It's written in Python. It is not using Ruby. Python is already available on most of Linux backdrops. If you are using any of their distributions, YUM or DNF, both are using Python. 
2. It is agentless. I don't have to think about which client system my unit has understanding in or not, because I can execute from my system. It will go and configure it, and any module that it is looking for will be shipped out.

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The ability to centralize everything, to centralize management, and to push changes quickly and reliably. That's the main use for us.

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The most valuable features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are the agentless platform and writing the code is simple using the Yaml computer language.

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I like the fact that Ansible is agentless.

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1. There are so many models that I don't have to create one. I don't have to worry about anything. In these two months, everything was easily available.
2. Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it. 

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• The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there.
• RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab.
• Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps. I can go create reports in Sumo Logic.
• Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them. 
  
• Also, the fact that Tower exposes APIs so other Playbooks can consume the APIs, it does complement other programs we use internally.

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The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps us achieve our mission because it's easy to write.

The Red Hat solutions fit together pretty well and work in conjunction with one another.

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We don't use Tower very often. We are currently primarily using the Ansible Playbook.

There are new modules available, which help to simplify the workflow. That is what we like about it.

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It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well. Roles that sum up all the playbooks that you might have. You might have a giant playbook which is doing a lot of things just for one app. However, there may be other people who have also tried to do the same thing. So, they create these roles, and you're able to automate easier without needing all those playbooks. You can have role declaration with a couple of Rs.

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• Reliability & reproducibility: Being able to design playbooks that can be validated in the development environment, QA, then production is very valuable. This helps reducing configuration errors and provides faster deployments.
• Extensibility, versatility. Using its wide range of modules, Ansible can be used with different OSes and systems. In fact, using Ansible modules, one can interface with network gear using NAPALM, for example, or push remotely scripts for local execution on automated platforms.
• Facts gathering: Ansible is able to extract configuration items either to be used later for reporting or to be used as conditions for playbook actions
• Agentless: Ansible does not require to install a local agent on automated devices. It goes through communication protocols like SSH, Telnet, SQL (multiple DBS).
• Dry runs! Better safe than sorry!

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The community is very important. Right now, I'm focusing on Palo Alto and automating a lot of our firewall processes related to when a developer requests new firewall rules. Right now, that's a totally manual process. I'm three weeks away from putting in an automated process from a third-party tagging system flowing into Ansible and actually writing to our Palo environment through our data centers throughout the world.

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I really love the user interface:

• The first time I started to use it, I found that it was well-built and very easy to navigate around. Things were were I expected them to be. I didn't have to go clicking around too much to find what I wanted to do. 
• The documentation on their website is well done. Anytime that I need to, I can pull up its six tabs. For example, I wrote my first Ansible playbook with no Internet on a plane and those six tabs cached in my phone's browser. 

Red Hat has always done a great job with their documentation. However, I sort of grew up around most of their products.

As far as the dashboard is concerned, it is a nice, quick, easy look without having to dig in, deep dive into the different metrics, etc. I obtain a quick presentation of what's failed and what's been successful. Having an operator and/or admin get that quick of a look is beneficial because they can quickly act and react to job failures, etc.

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The most useful features are the playbooks. We can develop our playbooks and simplify them doing something like a cross platform. Because right now, during deployment of OpenStack on different platforms, it is behaving a bit different. We want, and are trying, to develop a universal solution for all platforms.

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Everything in source control. All changes are visible while deploying.

• Ansible Galaxy for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks.
• Fact caching in redis for host/role grp information: Speeds up execution.
• Tags: To repeat task execution until the desired result is achieved. Quite useful in a test environment.
• Ansible comes with an orchestration layer.
• Sensitive data: Ansible has a command called ansible-vault. You can edit the file locally and it is saved in source control.
• Easy variable management.

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To me, a great thing about Ansible is that it can do everything. Cloud, on-prem, Windows, Linux, networking. I've not seen any other orchestration tool able to do that as easily.

The biggest thing I like about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config is actually what we intended. That's a big feature that I like about the product.

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The network modules.

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I prefer Ansible Core, but from an enterprise standpoint, an admin point of view, having the Dashboard and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out is helpful.

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I like Ansible because it is:

• Easy to use.
• Easy to read.
• Easy to maintain.
• Easy to support.
• It works without an agent.

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I like that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is easy to use.

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I have found the automation to be the most valuable feature.

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The simplicity of the programs is the best part and the fact that there is no need to install clients on your hosts makes it unique compared to other orchestration tools. View full review »

It has been simple to get into, and we are able to get results out of it quickly. We automate across a bunch of different server and virtualization platforms and have been able to do that with Ansible across the board along with our networks.

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Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users. It is also easy to learn. 

Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams.

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It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up. 

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• Agentless architecture, relying on SSH only.
• Great documentation.

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The countless modules and products supported.

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