Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is agentless configuration management and IT automation software built on open source Ansible and sold by quote.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform describes servers, network devices and cloud resources in playbooks and brings each one to that declared state. It connects over SSH or WinRM, so nothing is installed on the machines it manages. It is a Red Hat product, and Red Hat has been part of IBM since IBM completed the acquisition on 9 July 2019. The platform combines more than a dozen upstream open source projects into one security-hardened enterprise platform. It puts automation under one governance model and one management plane, from the data centre to the edge. Automation controller is the web console: it lists inventories with their groups and hosts, launches job templates and assigns roles over credentials, inventories and templates. Event-Driven Ansible starts a job from user-defined rules when an alert arrives, which is how drift on a node is found and corrected. The new automation orchestrator is where teams design and manage IT operations workflows. Underneath, Ansible Vault encrypts sensitive values, check mode previews a run without applying it, and the serial keyword rolls a change through hosts in batches that stop at a set failure percentage. Inventories can be read live from cloud providers, and community roles and collections install from Ansible Galaxy. The platform suits enterprises that automate hybrid cloud, edge, network and virtual infrastructure and want governance and vendor support around that work. IT operations, network and security teams run it, often in organisations already standardised on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat OpenShift. Customers can install it themselves on RHEL, on OpenShift or Azure Red Hat OpenShift, or from the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. Red Hat also runs it as a managed service on AWS and a managed application on Microsoft Azure, which takes installation and upgrades off the customer's hands. Network teams push one set of playbooks to switches and routers across campus, branch, cloud and edge networks, and the platform works with Cisco Catalyst Center. In AIOps, an AI tool flags a problem and Ansible carries out the governed fix, such as confirming a false positive or restarting a system. Security teams automate investigation, incident response and compliance enforcement, with credentials held in HashiCorp Vault or CyberArk. Virtualisation teams automate virtual machines across their lifecycle, including the move away from a legacy platform.