Getting Started with Ansible.utils Collection for Playbook Creators: Part 1

The Ansible ansible.utils collection includes a variety of plugins that aid in the management, manipulation and visibility of data for the Ansible playbook developer. The most common use case for this collection is when you want to work with the complex data structures present in an Ansible playbook, inventory, or returned from modules. See each plugin documentation page for detailed examples for how these utilities can be used in tasks. In this two-part blog we will overview this collection in part one and see an example use case of using the utils collection in detail in part two.

Plugins inside ansible.utils 

Plugins are code which will augment ansible core functionality. This code executes on control node.it and gives options and extensions for the core features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This ansible.utils plugin collection includes:

• Filter plugins
• Lookup plugins
• Test plugins
• Modules

Filter plugins

Filter plugins manipulate data. With the right filter you can extract a particular value, transform data types and formats, perform mathematical calculations, split and concatenate strings, insert dates and times, and do much more. Ansible Automation Platform uses the standard filters shipped with Jinja2 and adds some specialized filter Continue reading

The top 5 Ansible Automation Platform blogs of 2021

Year-end recaps have a way of encapsulating the most significant topics of the year, ones that sparked a curiosity to learn more, excitement to incorporate into our work, and inspiration to put our core takeaways into practice. As a newer member of the Ansible Automation Platform team, I’m always interested to learn which blogs resonate with our customers. To that end, we’re sharing our top five most read blogs so you can catch up on what you missed as well as gain some insight into what your peers are reading. For our Ansible blog aficionados, we welcome you to read alongside us for a refresher of what was most meaningful to your work this year. 

A common thread running through these posts: Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections. As you look to expand your automation in 2022, remember that there are over 100 Certified Content Collections from more than 40 partners, and Red Hat to help you jump start your next automation project with consistent and reusable modules, plug-ins and roles. 

Let’s dive in: 

5. Introduction to ansible-test

Even expert developers can make mistakes, so if you’re a busy content creator, you should always test your own Collections Continue reading

What’s new: network automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1

A financial customer explained his first automation priority in the most visual and understandable way: “I want to paint all of my network devices with the color of the company.” What I like about that analogy is that it clearly describes the first rule for automation: customers must define their golden configurations (the color to paint) to be able to automate configurations and later assess compliance, and remediate any issues accordingly. 

A “golden configuration” usually refers to a Day 1 configuration, and covers the minimal settings needed for a network device to be configured after a fresh network operating system installation. This usually includes common services such as NTP, DNS, AAA, Syslog, SNMP, and ACLs for management connectivity. 

As part of this blog, I will provide an overview for new automation capabilities available to achieve some of these Day 1 configuration activities. In addition to the enhancements for network configuration management, I will cover new Ansible Automation Platform capabilities that are frequently required by our network customers, such as:

• Detailing common operational benefits of Ansible Automation Platform.
  
  
• Measuring the value of automation use cases.
  
  
• Leveraging execution environments and automation mesh.

Certified Collections available in Ansible automation hub

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New reference architecture: Deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1

With the release of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.1, we are proud to deliver the latest reference architecture on the best practices for deploying a highly available Ansible Automation Platform environment. 

This reference architecture focuses on providing a step-by-step deployment procedure to install and configure a highly available Ansible Automation Platform environment from start to finish.

But there’s more!

Aside from the key steps to install Ansible Automation Platform, it incorporates key building blocks to optimize your Ansible Automation Platform environments, including:

• Centralized logging across multiple Ansible Automation Platform environments.
  
  
• Securing installation inventory passwords using ansible-vault.
  
  
• Using a combination of GitOps practices (configuration as code capabilities) and Git webhooks to streamline the automation and delivery of configurations to multiple Ansible Automation Platform sites automatically, immediately and consistently. 

What are the foundational pieces to this reference architecture?

The reference architecture consists of two environments of Ansible Automation Platform: Ansible Site 1 and Ansible Site 2 for high availability. Site 1 is an active environment while Site 2 is a passive environment. Each site consists of the following:

• A three node automation controller cluster with one PostgreSQL database.
  
  
• Continue reading

What’s new: an introduction to automation mesh

As part of the most recent Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 release announced December 2, 2021, we are excited to debut one of the most long-awaited features of the release: automation mesh. 

Automation mesh enables you to reliably and consistently automate at scale, across on-premises environments, the hybrid cloud, and to the edge. It delivers flexible design options, from single-site deployments to platform installations spanning the globe, wherever you are in your automation journey.

This blog details the benefits of automation mesh, a high-level overview of how it works, and how it helps you simplify scaling your automation across your enterprise environments. We are planning more detailed technical deep dive blogs with automation mesh use cases in the future, so stay tuned!

Why automation mesh?

Scaling automation across different platforms and locations is challenging. How do you ensure your automation executes consistently while still managing your platform centrally? How do you automate endpoints in remote areas with limited connectivity?

The best practice to overcome these challenges is delivering and running automation closer to the devices that need it. This design limits execution interruptions, which lead to inconsistent states, and possible downtime to IT services.

Enterprises, however, have multiple 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.

Why 2022 will be the year for edge automation

Seamlessly, every single day, we wake up and check our health statistics in smart watches, scan QR codes to validate information, pay using credit cards in different locations, use surveillance cameras to record our neighborhoods, and connect our smartphones to distributed WiFi access points in our restaurants or coffee shops. According to the Statista, in the Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025^[1] report, the number of mobile users worldwide reached 7.1 billion in 2021, and this number is projected to grow. This initiates a new set of use cases for edge devices due to the explosive growth of network-connected entry points.

Edge computing and networking is not specific to any industry; all of these scenarios span many different types of organizations. However, all edge scenarios have one common factor: creating and consuming data resources that are geographically distributed. As a final objective we want to analyze, consume or react to data to fulfill our customer and business needs.

Edge challenges here, and now 

12 years ago, I was the network administrator for a bank. We had a branch office connected through a satellite link, which was easily impacted by the constant heavy rains. In the Continue reading

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

Automation controller workflow deployment as code

Background: The Automation Controller Collection

The Automation Controller Collection allows Ansible Playbooks to automate the interaction with automation controller. For example, manually interacting via the Web-based UI or the API can now be automated just as the targets it manages.

This Collection provides a programmatic way to create, update or delete automation controller objects as well as perform tasks such as run jobs, change configurations and much more. This article discusses new updates to this Collection, as well as an example playbook and details on how to run it successfully.

The ansible.controller Ansible Collection is the downstream supported distribution available on Ansible automation hub, made to work with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.  The awx.awx Collection is the upstream community distribution available on Ansible Galaxy.  For more details on the difference between Ansible Galaxy and Ansible automation hub, please refer to Ajay Chenampara’s blog post.

In this post, we are use the ansible.controller Collection, but this can be replaced with the legacy ansible.tower or the awx.awx Collection depending on the user’s needs.

Using the Collection with Workflows

One of the goals of the Automation Controller Collection is to allow users to Continue reading

Automating execution environment image builds with GitHub Actions

Ansible Automation Platform 2 leverages containers dubbed automation execution environments which bundle in collection, python and platform dependencies to provide predictable, self-contained automation spaces that can be easily distributed across an organization.

In addition, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform introduced tools such as execution environment builder, used to create execution environments, and automation content navigator, used to inspect images and execute automation within execution environments. These tools themselves are also highly automatable and can be included in workflows to automatically generate environments to support the execution of automation throughout the organization.

For this demonstration, let's cut to film where I’ll walk through a demo scenario and verify along the way that we’re on the right track. Additionally, you can fork the repository for your own proof of concept.

Where to go next

• If you’re ready to get hands-on, we have self-paced interactive labs available to explore new Ansible Automation Platform 2 technologies.
• If you are a Red Hat customer, please visit the Ansible Automation Platform 2 landing page in the Red Hat Customer Portal that consolidates all our documentation and guidance available to you.
• Please reach out to your local Red Hat representative to assist your organization Continue reading

The Power of AI and the Science of Operations (Part 1)

A variety of industry experts cite Artificial Intelligence and Automation as key emerging trends.  But if you look around your organizations, you will see the evidence of AI projects and also an increasing focus on using automation in a variety of ways.  IBM and Red Hat together can help you build on and apply these trends to your IT operations. 

In this article, which is part 1 of the 2 articles that I intend to write, we will show how complex application environments produce more data than the humans tasked with running those environments can feasibly understand. And how the combination of an AIOps platform like Instana with an enterprise automation platform like Ansible Automation Platform can give human operators the edge they need to keep business critical applications running and users satisfied.

So much data, so little time

Having worked as an operation engineer in the past, I am aware of the all-too-familiar challenge of receiving a storm of alerts and trying to locate the root cause of an anomaly so as to isolate the problem and recover the services in the shortest possible time. However, conventional monitoring tools are often only able to raise Continue reading

AnisbleFest 2021 – What it means for Partners

As the weather turns to Fall, the seasons seem to parallel that of the technology cycles. Over the past couple of decades, we have seen various transformations within the high-tech area:

• From mainframe to distributed computing to hybrid cloud and now edge
• From databases to data warehouse to advanced analytics and machine learning
• From the challenges of storing a gigabyte of data, now grown to storing zetabytes+ of data per day.

All of this has moved businesses forward, driving great innovation. When it comes to infrastructure, nothing is more impactful than a core architectural update that fundamentally changes the way enterprises drive their business.  Distributed computing, distributed architectures like cloud, hybrid cloud and edge computing reinforce this  premise in the era of hybrid cloud computing.

The recent announcement of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 aligns to this blossoming hybrid cloud model, where automation meets the modern hybrid cloud environment.  This represents a great opportunity for our Red Hat Ansible Partner Ecosystem.

AnsibleFest Announcements  - Key Partner Takeaways

Red Hat recently held AnsibleFest 2021 which included some fantastic content that is still available on demand. I would like to highlight some of  the exciting AnsibleFest news and Continue reading

AnsibleFest 2021 – What it means for Partners

As the weather turns to Fall, the seasons seem to parallel that of the technology cycles. Over the past couple of decades, we have seen various transformations within the high-tech area:

• From mainframe to distributed computing to hybrid cloud and now edge
• From databases to data warehouse to advanced analytics and machine learning
• From the challenges of storing a gigabyte of data, now grown to storing zetabytes+ of data per day.

All of this has moved businesses forward, driving great innovation. When it comes to infrastructure, nothing is more impactful than a core architectural update that fundamentally changes the way enterprises drive their business.  Distributed computing, distributed architectures like cloud, hybrid cloud and edge computing reinforce this  premise in the era of hybrid cloud computing.

The recent announcement of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 aligns to this blossoming hybrid cloud model, where automation meets the modern hybrid cloud environment.  This represents a great opportunity for our Red Hat Ansible Partner Ecosystem.

AnsibleFest Announcements  - Key Partner Takeaways

Red Hat recently held AnsibleFest 2021 which included some fantastic content that is still available on demand. I would like to highlight some of  the exciting AnsibleFest news and Continue reading

Boost your cloud-native deployments with Red Hat OpenShift

Cloud-native deployments are becoming the new normal. Being able to keep full control of the application lifecycle (deployment, updates, and integrations) is a strategic advantage. This article will explain how the latest release of the Ansible Content Collection for Red Hat OpenShift takes the redhat.openshift Collection to the next level, improving the performance of large automation tasks. 

Red Hat OpenShift collection at a glance

The latest release of the redhat.openshift Collection  introduces Ansible Turbo mode. Ansible Turbo mode enhances the performance of Ansible Playbooks when manipulating many Red Hat OpenShift objects. This is done by reusing existing API connections to handle new incoming requests, removing the overhead of creating a new connection for each request. 

A real-world scenario

Red Hat OpenShift has become a leading platform that can handle many workloads in large enterprises dealing with multi-tenancy clusters. These are great candidates when different users, teams, and/or organizations are looking to run and operate in a shared environment.  

One of the best features of Red Hat OpenShift is the capability to quickly and easily create and destroy resources (e.g., namespace, ConfigMaps, Pod). Even with relatively light usage, deploying each one Continue reading

Ansible for AWS: Introduction to Spot Instance Automation

What are Spot Instance and Spot Instance Requests?

A Spot Instance is an instance that uses spare AWS EC2 capacity that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Because Spot Instances provide the ability to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, it can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. 

Spot Instances are a cost-effective choice if you can be flexible about when your applications run and whether your applications can be interrupted. For example, Spot Instances are well-suited for data analysis, batch jobs, background processing, and optional tasks.

Managing Spot Instances with Ansible

So you want to manage your Spot Instance Requests with Ansible Automation Platform? When it comes to managing AWS resources, the Ansible Amazon AWS Collection includes a variety of Ansible content to help automate the management of AWS instances. Using Ansible to automate applications in AWS greatly increases the chances that your cloud initiative will be a success.  

With the latest addition of new modules to the Ansible Amazon AWS Collection, we have introduced two new modules to help manage Spot Instance Requests efficiently.

The ec2_spot_instance module helps in creating as well as terminating the Spot Instance Requests, while it’s companion module, Continue reading

What’s New: The Ansible AWS Collection 2.0 Release

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the Ansible amazon.aws Collection brings a set of fresh features to build, manage and govern various public and hybrid cloud use cases while accelerating the process from development to production.

In this blog post, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 2.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.

Forward-looking Changes

Much of our work in the 2.0 release has been focused in the following areas:

• Enhancing several modules from the upstream community
• Promoting modules to being formally supported by Red Hat 
• Releasing various new enhancements and clarifying supportability policies

New boto3/botocore Support Policy

Starting with the 2.0 amazon.aws Collection release, it is now the Collection’s policy to support the versions of botocore and boto3 that were released 12 months prior to the most recent major Collection release, as well as following semantic versioning (for example, 2.0.0, 3.0.0). Individual modules may require a more recent library version to support specific features or require the boto library. Check the amazon.aws Collection documentation for the minimum required version for each module. Continue reading

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2: Migration strategy considerations

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces an updated architecture, new tools and an improved but familiar experience to automation teams. However, there are multiple considerations for your planning and strategy to migrate your current deployment to Ansible Automation Platform 2.

This document provides guidance to all of the stakeholders responsible for planning and executing an Ansible Automation Platform migration guidance with factors to address in your migration strategy.

This document does not provide a one-size-fits-all approach for migration. Various factors unique to your organization will impact the effort required, stakeholders involved and delivery plan.

What to consider before migrating

We understand that many factors specific to your needs affect your migration assessment and planning. This section highlights critical factors to determine your migration readiness and what approach will best suit your organization.

Assess your current environment

There will be configurations unique to your environment, and it’s crucial to perform a thorough technical assessment. We recommend including the following:

• Analyze your current Ansible Automation Platform installation, including current deployment patterns, integrations and any complexities relevant to the migration.
  
  
• Determine changes needed in your environment to meet the Ansible Automation Platform 2 technical requirements.
  
  
• Assess stakeholders’ readiness to plan and execute Continue reading

VMware resource MOID lookup filter

Are you trying to manage private clouds easily and efficiently using Ansible Automation Platform? When it comes to VMware infrastructure automation, the latest release of the vmware.vmware_rest Collection and new lookup plugins bring a set of fresh features to build, manage and govern various VMware use cases and accelerate the process from development to production.

The modules in the vmware.vmware_rest Collection rely on the resource MOID a lot. This is a design decision that we covered in an earlier blog. Consequently, when the users want to modify a VMware resource, they need to first write Ansible tasks to identify its MOID.

The new 2.1.0 release of vmware.vmware_rest Collection comes with a series of filter plugins dedicated to gathering the resource MOID. In this blog post, we will help you to keep your VMware automation playbooks concise.

But first, What is a MOID?

Internally VMware vSphere manages resources in the form of objects. Every object has a type and an ID. What we are calling MOID stands for Managed Object ID. Using the vSphere UI obfuscates the MOID logic from users and presents the objects in a visible hierarchy, potentially at several different locations.

Continue reading

What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2: automation content navigator

With the introduction of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2, several new key components are being introduced as a part of the overall developer experience. This includes automation execution environments, introduced to provide predictable environments during automation runtime. All collection dependencies are contained within the execution environment to make sure that automation created in development environments runs the same as in production environments.

Building execution environments is now easier with the introduction of the execution environment builder (ansible-builder) tool included with Ansible Automation Platform, while the updates to automation controller help IT teams leverage execution environments.

Considering the shift towards containerized execution of automation, the automation development workflow and pre-existing tooling must be reimagined. In short, ansible-navigator replaces ansible-playbook and other ansible-*` command line utilities.

However, ansible-navigator serves a much greater purpose than just a drop in replacement or alias to ansible-playbook. With this release, ansible-navigator is introduced as an application exclusively for developing and executing automation. Ansible-playbook has long been one of the first utilities that is leveraged in an Ansible automated environment. Building on the ease of use, the automation content navigator exposes automation runs in greater detail. Apart from debugging 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