John Hardy

Author Archives: John Hardy

New Ansible Galaxy

For awhile, the Red Hat Ansible team behind the components Ansible automation hub and Ansible cloud automation hub at console.redhat.com have been on a special ops mission to enhance the galaxy_ng code base that serves the aforementioned components to also serve galaxy.ansible.com, with the intention of replacing galaxy.ansible.com with a fresh code base.

Galaxy, a legacy far far away…

The current Galaxy service has been running at galaxy.ansible.com for many years and is hugely successful in the community. It drives and nurtures Ansible adoption by sharing prebuilt Ansible content that solves many automation challenges.

One of the statistics we are most proud of are the contributions of 33,965 individual automation answers by the community in either Ansible Content Collections or Ansible Roles. Some of the top ranking automation content includes AWS, VMware, Linux, and Windows. Community users are able to download content for free, self-supported and interact with authors via GitHub for any further help or enhancements.

We are excited to announce that the galaxy.ansible.com code base is being updated with a host of exciting new features that the Ansible community can look forward to. Brought to Continue reading

New Ansible Galaxy

Galaxy, a legacy far far away…

We are excited to announce that the galaxy.ansible.com code base is being updated with a host of exciting new features that the Ansible community can look forward to. Brought to Continue reading

What’s New and Next in Private Automation Hub

Private automation hub is the content system for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, hosting and serving up content to the platform in a scalable way with an enhanced security posture. The hosted content ranges from collections to container images, whether it's your own content, certified content from Red Hat or partner content from the extensive partner ecosystem, along with open source content from Ansible Galaxy.

Private automation hub is on its way to being the content management system for the Ansible Automation Platform and, with the most recent release, it has made some great steps to cementing itself as the de facto content system choice for Ansible Automation Platform.

Enhancing Software Supply Chain Security

Content can be pretty harmful if you cannot trust the source. Much like surfing the internet, we have become accustomed to knowing that if there is a “padlock” in the browser bar then we can consider the site safe. We also know that if we take content from the community, we do so at our own risk, but when you pay for a subscription that offers Red Hat Ansible Certified Content, you expect it to be safe. To drive this manner of safety and instill Continue reading

Importing/Exporting Collections in automation hubs

This article discusses how to export and import Collections from one automation hub to another.

Ansible automation hub stores Collections within repositories and the Collections are versioned by the curator, so therefore many versions of the same Collection can exist in the same or different repositories at the same time.

Ansible automation hub repositories store Collections as TAR files, as created by ansible-galaxy during the curation and publishing process. This makes for easy downloading and transportation, especially during import and export workflows. You can be assured that the Collection you are importing to the new repository is the same one that was exported, or originally created by ansible-galaxy (assuming nothing malicious has happened to it; for that level of protection we have digital collection signing and can discuss that in a future article).

There are many reasons why you may wish to export or import Collections from one automation hub to another, so here are some common use cases.

Your production automation hub is on a disconnected network

This scenario means that you need to move content from an internet connected automation hub to another automation hub over an air gap. This could be done using a USB Continue reading

8 private automation hub features about automation execution environments

8 private automatio hub features blog

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 introduced automation execution environments, which is a new way to package automation into a container runtime environment. In addition, private automation hub also joined the party by adding significant support for execution environments.

Let's dive into those features:

Feature 1 - The registry

Private automation hub now ships with the pulp container registry. This means it can store and serve up container images.

We only support the Ansible private automation hub registry serving execution environment images.

Feature 2 - Remote registries

The Ansible private automation hub user interface allows the administrator to define remote registries. This allows for the registry to mirror container images from their source. A good example of remote registries is adding the base execution environment images available at Red Hat.

To access the Red Hat registry, visit registry.redhat.io and use the same username and password that you use for access.redhat.com.

Upon adding the registry, you will see a new remote registry definition.

Feature 3 - Indexing a remote registry

This capability is available after you have added a remote registry as per Feature 2;click the menu on the registry Continue reading

Inside Ansible Automation Platform’s Automation Services Catalog

Automation services catalog blog

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 introduces a technical preview of automation services catalog.

Automation services catalog was first developed in the cloud at console.redhat.com, with capabilities for fast, agile development and feature release. Over time, Red Hat continually adapted features to meet customer requirements and incorporate their feedback. As customers became more familiar with the benefits, they’ve since requested the ability to access these catalog components within their firewalled infrastructure with direct access to the Ansible clusters and their corporate identity services. We continue to listen and are providing a private version of automation services catalog, installed by the platform installer alongside automation controller and private automation hub.

Products, Portfolios and Platforms

As far as catalogs go, there is a fairly standard pattern to follow. Here is the first glimpse of the user interface.

This image shows what are known as “products”. Products reside within “portfolios,” which allow the administrator to group products into sharable, access controlled folders. Products are simply references to a job template or workflow.

What I really like about having this new level of abstraction is that I can reference the same job template in a product multiple times. Continue reading

Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform New Report : Modules

Red Hat Insights is a suite of cloud services available on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, powered by an expert system that is built upon years of data collected from across Red Hat’s worldwide customer base. For Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers, it provides predictive analytical reporting of your Ansible automation.

This blog breaks down the new reports that analyze module usage within the Ansible Automation Platform.

In summary, module usage is really important because modules can contain security vulnerabilities and require updates to support new integrations of hardware or software. It is paramount to know which modules you are using in your automation.

Let's look at each report and what each of them can deliver for you.

Reports

Most used modules

Description: The number of job template and task runs, grouped by Ansible module usage.

Use Case: You can use this report to discover which modules are being used the most across your automation, helping you to check things like organization-wide adoption of purpose-built modules over potentially less performant, catch-all solutions.

Example:

This chart shows how the file and gather_facts modules are the most used, but also shows that over the past 6 Continue reading

Automation Services Catalog: A Deep Dive into What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform introduces automation services catalog, a new hosted service for Red Hat Ansible customers to extend their automation in a controlled way to the various end users who need it. This is a deep dive into the capabilities and features of the offering.

Users

The automation services catalog is designed to be a familiar experience, providing an easy and intuitive user interface for ordering products (automation resources).

john hardy blog 1

Products to Order

The idea is that those using the automation services catalog may not know that what they are ordering is actually Ansible Automation. For example, a product could be a business function, like ordering a new OpenShift project or onboarding a user to a new platform.

Ordering a product will present the user with options to facilitate the order. This could be provisioning the datacenter or applying permissions for a Kubernetes project. Upon submitting the order, the user can see the progress in their order queue. Users can search for past orders and see those currently in progress indicated by statuses including: Order, Failed, Approval Pending and Completed. Orders that are pending approval can be compared with ordering a product from a website and seeing Continue reading