Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Cloud Automation with Ansible and Terraform

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses are dependent on streamlined processes and efficient systems more than ever. One such revolutionary pathway towards a more efficient and flexible IT infrastructure is multi-cloud automation. In this blog, we will look at how to employ Ansible, a powerful automation tool, to tap into the immense potential of multi-cloud environments. We take you on a journey behind the scenes of our interactive labs, where our customers and prospects acquire hands-on experience with Ansible while exploring its newest features. In our labs, public clouds such as Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure are showcased. Using Ansible we can orchestrate a symphony of seamless provisioning and optimal multi-cloud management. So, buckle up for a deep dive into the realm of multi-cloud automation, where complexity is simplified, and potential is unleashed.

The Ansible Technical Marketing team uses a variety of tools to create training labs and technical sales workshops for our field teams and customers. One of our training platforms includes Instruqt, an as-a-service learning platform, to help us create sandbox environments that can be run in your browser window. For technical tools behind the scenes, we use a combination of Ansible and Packer to build Continue reading

What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4

We are excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, which continues to build on our core promise to help customers “Create, Manage, and Scale” their automation.

This blog post outlines a number of new features and capabilities found in the 2.4 release, including the long-anticipated general availability of Event-Driven Ansible. Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 is going to greatly expand the scope of both what and how organizations are able to automate with Ansible—so let’s dive right in.  

Event-Driven Ansible

Back at AnsibleFest 2022, we introduced the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview and the results have been very exciting. By developing this set of capabilities in the upstream community, we worked alongside the Ansible community, partners and customers to release numerous certified and community source plugins right at launch. Now fully supported as a component of Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, Event-Driven Ansible comes with a new webUI, Event-Driven Ansible controller, to help you integrate your Event-Driven Ansible with Ansible Automation Platform and take advantage of a host of new capabilities.

Event-Driven Ansible controller for Event-Driven Ansible - Getting Started

Event-Driven Ansible connects intelligent sources of events with corresponding actions via rules. Continue reading

What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.3

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3. If you didn’t get the opportunity to attend AnsibleFest 2022 in Chicago, or get time to watch the keynotes on the AnsibleFest content hub, I am the lucky Ansiblite (or is it Ansi-Bull) who will walk you through all the new, cool and exciting features coming with our new release. Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 introduces a number of new features and capabilities that deliver simpler, security-focused automation at scale. Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 is compatible with the Developer Preview of Event-Driven Ansible, a new set of capabilities that empower true end-to-end automation.

You can download the latest version directly from the Red Hat Customer Portal, or sign up for a free trial at red.ht/try_ansible. If you want to skip right to the documentation and release notes, check out the official Product Documentation page.

If you are new to Ansible Automation Platform 2 and wondering what automation execution environments, automation mesh, and automation content navigator all are, I highly recommend watching the video tour that our technical marketing team put together.  If you prefer reading, I recommend checking out Continue reading

Using Ansible and Packer, From Provisioning to Orchestration

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help you orchestrate, operationalize and govern your hybrid cloud deployments.  In my last public cloud blog, I talked about Two Simple Ways Automation Can Save You Money on Your AWS Bill and similarly to Ashton’s blog Bringing Order to the Cloud: Day 2 Operations in AWS with Ansible, we both wanted to look outside the common public cloud use-case of provisioning and deprovisioning resources and instead look at automating common operational tasks.  For this blog post I want to cover how the Technical Marketing team for Ansible orchestrates a pipeline for demos and workshops with Ansible and how we integrate that with custom AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) created with Packer.  Packer is an open source tool that allows IT operators to standardize and automate the process of building system images.

For some of our self-paced interactive hands-on labs on Ansible.com, we can quickly spin up images in seconds.  In an example automation pipeline we will:

1. Provision a virtual instance.
2. Use Ansible Automation Platform to install an application; in my case, I am literally installing our product Ansible Automation Platform (is that too meta?).
3. After the application Continue reading

Ansible vs. Terraform Demystified

Ansible and Terraform are two very powerful but unique open source IT tools that are often compared in competitive discussions.  We often see comparisons of the two tools - but many times, these comparisons are done purely from a “spec sheet” comparison. This type of comparison, while an interesting read, doesn’t take into account using the products at scale or if the comparison is realistic as a binary all-or-nothing approach. We at Red Hat have been helping enterprises for over 20 years and have a good idea how most IT administrators are using these two tools in production. Although both tools can generally do most things, we typically see that they are each leveraged by means of their biggest strengths as opposed to having to choose one or the other.

Spoiler:  The two tools are better together and can work in harmony to create a better experience for developers and operations teams.

Both Ansible and Terraform are open source tools with huge user bases, which often leads to cult followings because of the classical “hammer” approach.  That is, if my only tool is a hammer, every problem will start resembling a nail. This ends up trying to solve new Continue reading

Peeling back the layers and understanding automation mesh

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 features an awesome new way to scale out your automation workloads: automation mesh.  If you are unfamiliar with automation mesh, I highly recommend reading Craig Brandt’s blog post What's new: an introduction to automation mesh which outlines how automation mesh can simplify your operations and scale your automation globally.  For this blog post, I want to focus on the technical implementation of automation mesh, what network ports it is using and how you can secure it. 

To quickly summarize both Craig’s blog post and our documentation, we separated the control plane (which includes the webUI and API) from the execution plane (where an Ansible Playbook is executed) in Ansible Automation Platform 2.  This allows you to choose where jobs run across execution nodes, so you can deliver and run automation closer to the devices that need it. In our implementation, there is four different types of nodes:

• Control plane nodes: These are  accessed either via the WebUI and API. Execution capabilities are disabled on these nodes. 
• Execution nodes: This is where Ansible Playbooks are actually executed.  This node will run an automation execution environment which in Continue reading

Ask me Anything Recap – April

I recently had the opportunity to emcee an Ask me Anything webinar in April 12, These sessions are a good opportunity for the community, customers, partners and more to talk directly to Red Hat employees about what is happening on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and beyond. For this webinar, we had an awesome group of individuals with a diverse talent range across multiple skill sets from Product Management, Technical Marketing and Engineering:

• Richard Henshall - based in England, Richard is head of Product Management for Ansible Automation Platform
• Hicham Mourad - based in Canada, Hicham is a Technical Marketing manager for Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure 
• Anshul Behl - also in Canada, Anshul is a Technical Marketing manager for Ansible Automation Platform
• Mike Graves - joining us from North Carolina, Mike is a senior software engineer working on Ansible for public clouds and Ansible for cloud native
• Shane McDonald - senior principal software engineer working on automation controller, automation execution environments and Podman as well as Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Integration

To watch the webinar on-demand check it out here. 

As it turns out, we can’t get to every question that comes in, so we had Continue reading

Two Simple Ways Automation Can Save You Money on Your AWS Bill

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an excellent automation and orchestration tool for public clouds. For this post, I am going to walk through two common scenarios where Ansible Automation Platform can help out. I want to look outside the common public cloud use-case of provisioning and deprovisioning resources and instead look at automating common operational tasks.

What is an operational task? It is simply anything that an administrator has to do outside of creating and deleting cloud resources (e.g. instances, networks, keys, etc.) to help maintain their company's public cloud account. One of the problems I’ve encountered is instances being left on, running up our public cloud bill in the background while we were focusing our attention elsewhere. The more users you have, the more likely problems are to occur; automation can help address these issues and maintain control of your account. There are two common scenarios I want to address here:

1. Bespoke AWS instances were manually created for a one-off initiative, usually to test something, then instances were forgotten about and left running.
2. Continuous Integration (CI) instances were spun up to test changes programmatically every time a Pull Request (PR) went into our project, and would Continue reading

How to Migrate your Ansible Playbooks to Support AWS boto3

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is known for automating Linux, Windows and networking infrastructure. While both the community version of Ansible and our enterprise offering, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, are prominently known for configuration management, this is just a small piece of what you can really achieve with Ansible’s automation. There are many other use-cases that Ansible Automation Platform is great at automating, such as your AWS, Azure or Google public cloud. 

Ansible Automation Platform can automate deployments, migrations and operational tasks for your public cloud. This is extremely powerful because you can orchestrate your entire infrastructure workflow, from cloud deployment, to instance configuration, to retirement, rather than requiring a point tool for each separate use-case. This also allows IT administrators to concentrate on automating business outcomes rather than individual technology silos.

Specifically for this blog, I wanted to cover converting your Ansible Playbooks for provisioning an instance on AWS from the unsupported ec2 module to the fully supported ec2_instance module. Amazon has deprecated their Software Development Kit (SDK) Boto in favor of the newer fully supported SDK Boto3. Alina Buzachis announced What's New: The Ansible AWS Collection 2.0 Release back in October 2021, which includes Continue reading

Five ways to get started with network automation

As many of you know, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a highly flexible IT automation platform that can automate your Linux and Windows instances, your VMware private cloud, your AWS, Azure or Google public cloud, and even your security infrastructure.  Today I want to write about one of my favorite use-cases; using Ansible Automation Platform for network automation. It provides easy, highly customizable automation for your routers and switches so you can automate them just like any other IT infrastructure.

However, even though network automation has become increasingly popular, most organizations are still managing their network infrastructure manually by a CLI or GUI. Why is this? This manual CLI work often means that network engineers are reactive and constantly drowning with break-fix network issues because of manual mis-configurations, or the inability to implement change quickly and efficiently.

Because network engineers are so busy firefighting in their day job, they don’t have time to look at a new activity like automating, even though automation will save them time and money in the long run. I fundamentally believe that network automation is not an all or nothing situation.  You need to adopt network automation in small increments so you Continue reading

Ansible Automation Platform – A video tour

Many people are familiar with the community version of Ansible, the command line automation tool, but I wanted to elaborate on how our enterprise offering, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, and how it expands the possibilities of Ansible for our customers in Red Hat's most recent release.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform forges that open source innovation into a single, secure enterprise solution. We released our latest version Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 in December 2021, and there are a ton of new components, features and capabilities. So the technical marketing team put together a video tour of Ansible Automation Platform 2. It’s an 8 minute overview that we hope will provide automators with a useful guide to all of the new tools available to them, and how all the parts of Ansible Automation Platform fit together. 

If you’re looking to learn more about a specific component of the platform, you can jump right to it:

• Automation controller - 00:00:46
• Automation mesh - 00:01:25
• Automation execution environments - 00:01:59
• Execution environment builder - 00:02:34
• Ansible content tools (highlight ansible-navigator) - 00:02:48
• Microsoft VS code plugin - 00:03:43
• Ansible Content Collections - 00:04:14
• Ansible automation hub - 00:05:03
• Private Continue reading

Introducing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1

We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1. This is the follow-on to the Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 Early Access released this summer, and announced at AnsibleFest 2021. Red Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 introduces major features that allow customers to onboard more easily with even more flexible automation architectures and use cases. Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 is the culmination of many years of reimagining how enterprise automators automate for today and tomorrow.

You can download the latest version directly from the Red Hat Customer Portal, or sign up for a free trial at red.ht/try_ansible. Ansible Automation Platform is the Ansible you know and love, designed for the enterprise. I am going to summarize Andrius Benokraitis’ blog post from September, when Ansible Automation Platform 2 was announced, and expand on some key developments from 2.0 to 2.1.

First, some general information:

• The Ansible Automation Platform life cycle page has been updated.
  
  
• Moving forward, every Ansible Automation Platform minor release will now have its own unique Red Hat Subscription Management repo, which requires an Ansible Automation Platform subscription.

Automation for the cloud: Cloud Field Day 12 recap

I recently had the opportunity to present our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform cloud strategy at Cloud Field Day 12. 

Cloud Field Day 12 was a three day event that focused on the impact of cloud on enterprise IT. As a presenter, you can use any combination of slides and live demos to foster a discussion with a group of thought leaders. This roundtable included people from many different companies, skill sets, backgrounds and favorite tools. Check out the Cloud Field Day website to see the delegate panel, their backgrounds and Twitter handles. I quite enjoyed, and preferred, the conversational tone of Cloud Field Day, and the delegates who asked questions during the demo made it a lot more interactive. 

Red Hat presented three products at Cloud Field Day: Red Hat OpenShift, which is our enterprise-ready Kubernetes container platform, Ansible Automation Platform, which I co-presented with Richard Henshall, our Head of Product and Strategy for Ansible Automation Platform, and finally Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, which extends the value of Red Hat OpenShift by deploying apps, managing multiple clusters and enforcing policies across multiple clusters at scale. I will list all three videos below.

Continue reading

What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2: private automation hub

We are excited to announce that the Ansible Automation Platform 2 release includes private automation hub 4.3. Private automation hub provides automation developers the ability to collaborate and publish their own automation content and streamline delivery of Ansible code within their organization.

Private automation hub in Ansible Automation Platform 2 primarily delivers support for automation execution environments. Execution environments are a standardized way to define, build and distribute the environments that the automation runs in. In a nutshell, automation execution environments are container images that allow for easier administration of Ansible by the platform administrator. If you are unfamiliar with execution environments, please refer to this blog written by Technical Marketing manager Anshul Behl.

Private automation hub will serve as the on-premises execution environment container image repository for customers who wish to use this feature, aimed at customers who run the platform on physical or virtual environments. Ansible Automation Platform will seamlessly integrate with private automation hub for publishing and pulling execution environment container images.

Who uses private automation hub?

Private automation hub is intended for curating automation content from creators and making it seamlessly accessible to operators. It makes it easy to share these execution environments, which make Continue reading

Ansible Network Resource Purge parameter

Red Hat Ansible Network Automation continues to be a popular domain for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. We have continually developed additional resource modules to make automating network appliances easier, and more approachable, for novices and experts alike. These resource modules provide a consistent experience across multiple network vendors. There are seven main state parameters for resource modules: merged, replaced, overridden, deleted, gathered, rendered and parsed. The Ansible network team is adding one more parameter, purged, to this tool chest for resource modules. This blog will cover the purged parameter and show use-cases through a practical example.

For this example, we will be using two BGP resource modules to configure a Cisco network device. We will be using the bgp_global module, which was covered in Rohit’s blog post, and the bgp_address_family module. The BGP configuration is split between these two separate modules to simplify configuration and data models associated with them.

Let’s start with a data model:

bgp_global:
    as_number: '65000'
    bgp:
        log_neighbor_changes: true
        router_id:
            address: 192.168.1.1
    neighbor:
    -   activate: true
        address: 10.200.200.2
        remote_as: 65001
bgp_address_family:
    address_family:
    -   afi: ipv4
        neighbor:
        -   activate: true
            address: 10.200.200.2
        network:
        -   address: 10.25. Continue reading

Ansible Network Resource Modules: Deep Dive on Return Values

The Red Hat Ansible Network Automation engineering team is continually adding new resource modules to its supported network platforms.  Ansible Network Automation resource modules are opinionated network modules that make network automation easier to manage and more consistent for those automating various network platforms in production. The goal for resource modules is to avoid creating and maintaining overly complex jinja2 templates for rendering and pushing network configuration, as well as having to maintain complex fact gathering and parsing methodologies.  For this blog post, we will cover standard return values that are the same across all supported network platforms (e.g. Arista EOS, Cisco IOS, NXOS, IOS-XR, and Juniper Junos) and all resource modules. 

Before we get started, I wanted to call out three previous blog posts covering resource modules. If you are unfamiliar with resource modules, check any of these out:

• acls - the resource module for configuring access control lists on network devices. For example: junos_acls on Juniper Junos
  
  Deep Dive: ACL Configuration Management Using Ansible Network Automation Resource Modules
  
  
• ospfv2 - the resource module for configuring the routing protocol OSPF. For example: ios_ospfv2 for OSPF configuration on Cisco IOS
  
  Getting Started With OSPFV2 Resource Modules Continue reading

Ansible Network Resource Modules: Deep Dive on Return Values

The Red Hat Ansible Network Automation engineering team is continually adding new resource modules to its supported network platforms.  Ansible Network Automation resource modules are opinionated network modules that make network automation easier to manage and more consistent for those automating various network platforms in production. The goal for resource modules is to avoid creating and maintaining overly complex jinja2 templates for rendering and pushing network configuration, as well as having to maintain complex fact gathering and parsing methodologies.  For this blog post, we will cover standard return values that are the same across all supported network platforms (e.g. Arista EOS, Cisco IOS, NXOS, IOS-XR, and Juniper Junos) and all resource modules. 

Before we get started, I wanted to call out three previous blog posts covering resource modules. If you are unfamiliar with resource modules, check any of these out:

• acls - the resource module for configuring access control lists on network devices. For example: junos_acls on Juniper Junos
  
  Deep Dive: ACL Configuration Management Using Ansible Network Automation Resource Modules
  
  
• ospfv2 - the resource module for configuring the routing protocol OSPF. For example: ios_ospfv2 for OSPF configuration on Cisco IOS
  
  Getting Started With OSPFV2 Resource Modules Continue reading

Now Available: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 1.2

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 is now generally available with increased focus on improving efficiency, increasing productivity and controlling risk and expenses.  While many IT infrastructure engineers are familiar with automating compute platforms, Ansible Automation Platform is the first holistic automation platform to help manage, automate and orchestrate everything in your IT infrastructure from edge to datacenter.  To download the newest release or get a trial license, please sign up on http://red.ht/try_ansible.

An automation platform for mission critical workloads

The Ansible project is a remarkable open source project with hundreds of thousands of users encompassing a large community.  Red Hat extends this community and open source developer model to innovate, experiment and incorporate feedback to satisfy our customer challenges and use cases.  Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform transforms Ansible and many related open source projects into an enterprise grade, multi-organizational automation platform for mission-critical workloads.  In modern IT infrastructure, automation is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s often now a requirement to run, operate and scale how everything is managed: including network, security, Linux, Windows, cloud and more. 

Ansible Automation Platform includes a RESTful API for seamless integration with existing IT tools Continue reading

Control your content with private Automation Hub

Private Automation Hub is now available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform release 1.2, providing an easier way for our customers to manage their Ansible content. Whether they produce private content, access trusted and supported content from Red Hat or obtain content from third party or other community sources, an internally controlled capability is essential to support the continued growth of automation. As automation becomes critical to managing IT activities, so too becomes the need to have a focal point where collaboration can be encouraged, content shared and trust reinforced. 

Private Automation Hub is a self-hosted Ansible content management system. Organizations can host private hubs on their own infrastructure and manage it themselves. Similar to how Red Hat Satellite enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to manage operating system content, private Automation Hub enables automation teams to manage Ansible automation content.  Private Automation Hub allows curation and distribution of Ansible content as close as possible to Ansible Automation Platform clusters. Private Automation Hub is included in the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription.

Ansible content can be broken up into three main categories:

1. Community content found in Ansible Galaxy
2. Red Hat certified and supported content Continue reading

Automation Analytics – ROI Calculator and Notifications enhancements

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is continually offering enhancements through its hosted services on cloud.redhat.com. At Red Hat Summit 2020 the new automation services catalog took the spotlight, which provides lifecycle management, provisioning, retirement and cataloging of automation resources to your business. However I wanted to also talk about the additional new  enhancements coming to Automation Analytics! Specifically I have two big things I want to talk about:

• Automations Calculator - a ROI (return on investment) calculator using aggregate data
• Notification improvements and a dedicated panel

If you are unfamiliar with Automation Analytics it is included as part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription and allows customers to analyze, aggregate, and report on data for their Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform deployments. Check out the previous blog I wrote about Getting Started with Automation Analytics, or if you have concerns around what type of data is being shared with Red Hat check out my blog Automation Analytics: Part 2 - Looking at Data Collection.

Automation Calculator

I am super excited about this new feature of Automation Analytics. A lot of customers I get to meet with are trying to figure out how to Continue reading