Scaling Automation Controller for API Driven Workloads

When scaling automation controller in an enterprise organization, administrators are faced with more clients automating their interactions with its REST API. As with any web application, automation controller has a finite capacity to serve web requests, and  web clients can experience degraded service if that capacity is met or superseded.

In this blog, we will explore methods to:

1. Increase the number of web requests an Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform cluster can serve.
2. Implement best practices on the client side to reduce the load on the automation controller API to improve performance and uptime.   

We will use automation controller 4.2 in our examples, but many of the best practices  and solutions described in this blog apply to most versions, including Ansible Tower 3.8.z.

Use cases that cause high-volume API requests

In this section, we will outline some of the use cases that can drive a high volume of API requests. In the recommendations section, we will address options to improve the quality of service at the client, load balancer, and controller levels.

External inventory management

In some use cases, organizations maintain their inventory in an external system. This practice can lead to a pattern Continue reading