Enhancing/Maximizing your Scaling capability with Automation Controller 2.3

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 is the next generation automation platform from Red Hat’s trusted enterprise technology experts. We are excited to announce that the Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 release includes automation controller 4.3.

In the previous blog, we saw that automation controller 4.1 provides significant performance improvements as compared to Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.8. Automation controller 4.3 is taking that one step further. We will elaborate on an important change with callback receiver workers in automation controller 4.3 and how it can have an impact on the performance.

Callback Receiver

The callback receiver is the process in charge of transforming the standard output of Ansible into serialized objects in the automation controller database. This enables reviewing and querying results from across all your infrastructure and automation.  This process is I/O and CPU intensive and requires performance considerations.

Every control node in automation controller has a callback receiver process. It receives job events that result from Ansible jobs. Job events are JSON structures, created when Ansible calls the runner callback plugin hooks. This enables Ansible to capture the result of a playbook run. The job event data structures contain Continue reading

Performance Improvements in Automation Controller 4.1

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 is the next generation automation platform from Red Hat’s trusted enterprise technology experts. With the release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.1, users now have access to the latest control plane – automation controller 4.1.

Automation controller helps standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, allowing enterprises to automate with confidence while reducing sprawl and variance. Users can manage inventory, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate into reporting, all from a centralized user interface and RESTful API.

Automation controller 4.1 provides significant performance improvements when compared to its predecessor Ansible Tower 3.8. To put this into context, we used Ansible Tower 3.8 to run jobs, capture various metrics while jobs were running/finished, and compare that with automation controller 4.1. This post highlights the significant performance improvements in automation controller 4.1.

Benchmark framework

In order to deep dive into the prospective performance enhancements with the latest automation controller, we at the performance engineering team at Red Hat created a benchmarking framework consisting of the following workflow:

• Installation of RHEL 8.3 virtual machines with 4 CPU and 16 GB RAM deployed within the IBM Cloud
• Continue reading