Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Initial Setup
JA
Jeewan Abeysekara
Information Technology Engineer at London Stock Exchange PLC
The initial setup was a bit complex. Some of the web addresses were not working on the technical or management levels. Our team was very focused on policies and secure environments. Our team level is different from company management.
View full review »DE
reviewer1453662
Linux Platform System Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
It is agentless. All we had to do is set up the control station, then Python was installed on all our Linux hosts. So, it was easy. The deployment took less than an hour.
The SSH keys were already in place. We already had the account, where we tested it out beforehand. Therefore, we knew exactly what we needed to do to deploy it. The keys were the hardest thing to set up and that was already in place (prior to Ansible).
View full review »The initial setup is straightforward.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Setup is straightforward. There's no complexity. We had to learn some Linux information before setup.
The length of deployment depends on the nodes. It will show if everything is deployed or not, any changes, and if there are any failed nodes.
Security patching is enough for maintenance.
AV
Aneesh Vadakkoott Mohan
Principal Infrastructure Engineer at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees
The initial setup for Ansible is very easy.
I'm not using the solution in this containerization. In the present environment, we are not using something like Red Hat Ansible Tower. We are using just an Ansible node which is something we use as a server for accessing all of our nodes and managing all of the nodes. Also, building an Ansible node as a bastion or jump host is a pretty easy task.
SN
reviewer2016369
Lead Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The setup is pretty straightforward. The government on our side makes things a bit tough but that has nothing to do with the solution.
View full review »JS
reviewer2260164
Manager- Automation Engineering at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
The solution's initial setup is not it's not hard. The steps to install the solution seem to be easy.
View full review »The solution’s initial setup is very easy.
View full review »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.
View full review »TE
Thomas Elrod
Senior Systems Administrator at Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center
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.
View full review »JL
Jinpin Lim
Owner at Inventrics technologies
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.
View full review »The initial setup and deployment were easy, but the first two days of operations were a bit complex. We completed the deployment in-house.
View full review »MC
reviewer1668990
DevOps Consultant at a government with 501-1,000 employees
When you need to use Ansible, you need to grab the Ansible binary. A typical method in Linux would be to use the Package Manager to install it. You could also use a Python-native method for installing it through pip.
Another good method would be to simply get your Ansible Docker-ized or pull a Docker image from a third-party repository and that image would have Ansible deployed in it. That way, every time you need to run Ansible, you could just an image and that image would provide the binary for Ansible.
The next step is related to your particular use case, what you need to use and how you need to use it. For example, if you want to write a small portion that does something, you simply instruct Ansible to use that code against the targets. By "targets" I mean you need to provide an inventory that you want to run your code against.
Another step that needs to happen in order to use Ansible nicely is to set up passwordless authentication to use SSH keys instead of passwords. That's what should probably happen together with installing or delivering Ansible binaries. Once you have these elements, binaries and authentication, your system is pretty much ready to be configured through Ansible.
Because I'm quite senior and specialized in Red Hat and, in general, a Linux expert, deploying Ansible literally takes me minutes.
Implementation strategy would vary from case to case, but one of the popular ways of deploying Ansible is to have a bastion host that allows you to access your estates over SSH keys and simply have Ansible running from that host. Ideally, you would like to see what Ansible is changing on every run so a good practice would be to have CI/CD orchestration for Ansible, using Jenkins or another CI/CD tool that allows you to keep historical logs on how Ansible behaves, and what has changed in an estate during an Ansible run. That would be the minimal implementation I would suggest for an organization.
View full review »The initial setup was easy. I was not a part of the deployment process, but my team members told me about the deployment process.
The initial setup is quite easy. The deployment took 15 to 30 minutes. The tool was deployed on a Linux machine. People deploying the solution must have some hands-on experience in Linux.
View full review »The setup is very easy.
Management is a bit different day to day as you automate. It takes time to realize all the benefits. Two staff people can easily manage the solution.
View full review »I was involved in the initial setup. I use it in the lab server for now, and it is good. It is going to be in production soon. However, we already deployed it in lower environments, like the QA and development servers.
View full review »The solution's initial setup process was simple. The solution gets used in various ways, and it's essentially a configuration tool you run from any node with access to other nodes. It has got server versions as well. So, you can use it either way.
View full review »PT
reviewer1630809
Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It was straightforward. The deployment took about a week.
View full review »Initial setup was complex.
To deploy everything from the Red Hat portfolio took one week per customer.
Our strategy combines very closely with cloud, which is why our approach is complex. We are trying to persuade and migrate customers to the cloud, AWS, or GCP, and as an additional value, we can automate and more or less migrate it to an environment to bring new approaches and make this cloud solution beneficial to customers.
View full review »NS
NishantSingh
Student at ARTH
It is a very straightforward process. There is a package available on their site. After we download their software for the respective distro, we just write the installation command, and everything runs greatly. After installing the product, most people make use of Ansible roles. Ansible Galaxy is already filled with a lot of roles. A lot of developers have already contributed to a great setup with their proper codes. As a user, I have to just install a role or just download it from the site. It was not a lengthy or complex process. It was very easy.
For the initial setup, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes in going through sites and searching for a particular version. The installation will take about 5 minutes. After that, you have to configure Ansible properly, which might take a little bit of time, but it also depends on whether you know the IP address of the host. If you know the IP address and credentials, then you just have to enter it in the Ansible configuration file, and it is done.
There is good integration between RHEL and Ansible. There are repositories configured for Ansible and you just enter the yum install ansible command, and it will do all the setup and it will also create a basic configuration file. The only remaining task would be to configure that inventory. You need to know the IP address of the host to which you are going to connect and the password. After you enter it into the inventory, it runs very quickly. There is no need to download it from any site. If you're using Ansible with Red Hat, then there is very little chance of any error while using Ansible.
Ansible's documentation is well-maintained and updated very frequently. You just need to go through the documentation. It is very easy to read. There is nothing much to worry about.
View full review »MR
Mahmmoud Rabie
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
The initial setup was straightforward.
View full review »AG
AliceGolakiya
Devops Engineer at Infosys Ltd
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.
View full review »MI
Mohamed Ibrahim
Senior DevOps at RubiconMD
The integration and configuration in our AWS environment was super easy to set up. It does all our tasks. Having it integrate with our front-end and back-end deployment has all been seamless. There is no custom configurations.
View full review »SR
Steven Roth
Linux Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
The setup looks pretty straightforward. From what I've seen, although it was done by another person, it seemed to be pretty simple. I think it was an RPM.
View full review »Setting up Ansible is straightforward because we use the Docker image. There may be some challenges if you have large-scale VMs. It's typically fine if we use configuration management for the credentials and SSH. If you want to use Ansible to provision VMs like TerraForm, then we need to clearly understand the mechanism. The time needed to deploy Ansible depends on the type of applications and infrastructure you're dealing with. It isn't only about the specs of the VM. The network speed and complexity also factor into it.
View full review »SD
reviewer1525251
Cognitive Business Operation at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The solution is very straightforward. It's easy to set up. It's not difficult at all.
How many engineers you need to handle the implementation depends on the project and use case. It depends, for example, on how many automations will be created, et cetera. The time it takes to deploy also varies. Different use cases have different deployment times.
View full review »MJ
Marek Jeerzejewicz
Senior Director Network Security at Oracle Corporation
The setup is straightforward. It's as easy as anything else to set up.
View full review »BW
BoB Woodraska
Systems Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Initial setup boils down to installing Ansible and ensuring you have SSH access to a target that is running Python. Standard packaging is available on major Linux distros to install some level of Ansible. I recommend following instructions on Ansible's site to get the latest stable release as they have been improving rapidly.
View full review »AB
Ahmad Bukhari
Senior Security Engineer at Mindpoint
The setup is simple and easy.
View full review »MK
Meltron Kendrick
Senior Systems at a government with 10,001+ employees
The setup was done by another team of ours that we worked closely with. They walked us through setting up our own, and it's pretty straightforward. Once you install it, stand it up, and get all the configuration files in place, it seems pretty straightforward.
I was surprised that it was so straightforward.
View full review »YS
Yogesh_Sharma
Senior Data Architect at Crunchy Data
There is always a learning curve when you are using a new tool. Other than that, the initial setup is straightforward.
View full review »AB
Andy Brittingham
Systems Administrator at Main Street softworks
The setup of Ansible is straightforward. You just download it and get started.
In terms of the documentation, I'm used to it, so it works fine for me now. At first, it took me a minute to find out exactly how to quickly find my way around the documentation, but now I'm comfortable in it and I'm happy with it.
View full review »MK
ManojKumar33
Graduate Trainee at a construction company with 201-500 employees
The initial setup of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is simple.
View full review »I rate Ansible 10 out of 10 for ease of deployment. Deploying Ansible was straightforward and only takes about a minute. It starts with the CI/CD process, and it's automated so that when there is a change to the code, the changes are applied across servers or applications.
View full review »SJ
Shashank Jha
Senior Software Developer at HCL Technologies
The initial setup is pretty straightforward.
View full review »SS
SeniorOp7b07
Senior Operations Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
The initial setup was pretty straightforward.
View full review »MM
reviewer1898610
Chief Cloud Architect
The initial setup is quite straightforward.
This solution does not require specific maintenance.
View full review »EG
Eric Greene
Senior DevOps Engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
You install Ansible and are done. Even YUM or DNF installs, they are pretty easy to install. All the core modules support Python 3, so if you're moving to Python 3, it works. Python 2.7 is pretty much standard.
View full review »FN
Faycal Noushi
CEO/Founder at Zen Networks
The initial setup is quite easy. Creating your first playbook and inventory can be challenging if you're not used to the underlying technologies.
View full review »ES
Eric Spencer
Network Engineer at a legal firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The setup is pretty straightforward. Getting started with Ansible, training on Pluralsight, it's about three hours. You do some labs and, from there, it's off to the races.
View full review »JG
JoeGarcia
Principal Engineer at CyberArk
It depends on the method that you choose. I deployed it in AWS just fine using the CloudFormation template that was provided on the website. As long as people are doing that, then they'll be good to go. I've never had an issue deploying. I can't imagine anybody having an issue deploying it. They do a pretty good job of orchestrating the orchestrator.
View full review »SK
Sergey Kletsko
Solution Integrator at Kpco
It is easy.
View full review »CB
Solution1dd5
Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
In terms of the setup, there are still aspects that are a bit complex to set up, especially the different Python libraries' dependencies. I use it against Windows as well and that means integrating with Kerberos. But I've actually developed a role on GitHub to stand up an Ansible development workstation with all those requirements to make it easy. I actually use Ansible to deploy Ansible, which is kind of ironic.
View full review »CS
Chris Smolen
Senior Network Engineer at ePlus Technology
Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner.
View full review »CM
Clarence Mills
System Engineer at a tech vendor
At the time, the setup was pretty straightforward. I don't think there have been any changes in that regard.
View full review »DT
Dave Thelen
Software Engineer at Arista
It's pretty straightforward.
Sometimes from version to version, some discrepancies can make it a challenge to work through, but for the most part it's pretty straightforward. One of the reasons in the network industry that Ansible won out over some of the other automaton tools is the low barrier to entry. It's pretty simple to get started.
View full review »It was easy to install and easy to use.
View full review »The initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete.
View full review »
Setup is easy. Every distro has packages available and if you have a weird distro that hasn't one, you can install it easily with python pip or download it from github.
View full review »
LV
Logan Vig
Co Founder at LIMESTONE NETWORKS INC
The initial setup is simple.
View full review »Not at all, just need to have general knowledge of SSH.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
769,599 professionals have used our research since 2012.