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

Technology Short Take 148

Welcome to Technology Short Take #148, aka the Thanksgiving Edition (at least, for US readers). I’ve been scouring RSS feeds and various social media sites, collecting as many useful links and articles as I can find: from networking hardware and networking CI/CD pipelines to Kernel TLS and tricks for improving your working memory. That’s quite the range! I hope that you find something useful here.

Networking

• Here’s an article on the recently-introduced pwru tool, which aims to help with tracing network packets in the Linux kernel. It seems like it may be a bit too debug-level to be useful to the average person, but I have yet to lay hands on it myself and find out for sure.
• Matt Mullen has a pretty lengthy (and informative) article on using the Python requests module to work with REST APIs. Good stuff here.
• While reading Tom Hollingsworth’s article regarding “slower” Wi-Fi on the M1-based MacBook Pro laptops (a good read, BTW), he shared a link to this post about drag racing the bus. Hilarious—but very true. Also found via Tom’s article was this post on Wi-Fi throughput, which I found to be a very informative read.
• Ivan Pepelnjak explains the concepts 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

Using Kustomize Components with Cluster API

I’ve been using Kustomize with Cluster API (CAPI) to manage my AWS-based Kubernetes clusters for quite a while (along with Pulumi for managing the underlying AWS infrastructure). For all the time I’ve been using this approach, I’ve also been unhappy with the overlay-based approach that had evolved as a way of managing multiple workload clusters. With the recent release of CAPI 1.0 and the v1beta1 API, I took this opportunity to see if there was a better way. I found a different way—time will tell if it is a better way. In this post, I’ll share how I’m using Kustomize components to help streamline managing multiple CAPI workload clusters.

Before continuing, I feel it’s important to point out that while the bulk of the Kustomize API is reasonably stable at v1beta1, the components portion of the API is still in early days (v1alpha1). So, if you adopt this functionality, be aware that it may change (or even get dropped).

More information on Kustomize components can be found in the Kustomize components KEP or in this demo document. The documentation on Kustomize components is somewhat helpful as well. I won’t try to rehash information found in those sources here, but Continue reading

Technology Short Take 147

Welcome to Technology Short Take #147! The list of articles is a bit shorter than usual this time around, but I’ve still got a good collection of articles and posts covering topics in networking, hardware (mostly focused on Apple’s processors), cloud computing, and virtualization. There’s bound to be something in here for most everyone! (At least, I hope so.) Enjoy your weekend reading!

Networking

• Chris Parker shares the reason why 65535 is not part of the private autonomous system range. It’s an interesting history lesson and explanation, even if you aren’t a networking nerd.
• Dmytro Shypovalov discusses ARP problems in EVPN. I laughed at his comment regarding people stepping on rakes (read the post).
• Evgeny Khabarov’s part 4 in a series on using Envoy as an API gateway talks about authentication and authorization (aka AuthN/AuthZ). In particular, Khabarov focuses on Envoy’s ext_authz filter, which is what allows Envoy to check with an authorization service to see if a request is permitted or denied.
• I was having a bit of difficulty fully grokking the Original Destination feature in Envoy, and I found this article to be helpful in understanding how it works and is configured. Another very helpful resource on 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

Influencing Cluster API AMI Selection

The Kubernetes Cluster API (CAPI) project—which recently released v1.0—can, if you wish, help manage the underlying infrastructure associated with a cluster. (You’re also fully able to have CAPI use existing infrastructure as well.) Speaking specifically of AWS, this means that the Cluster API Provider for AWS is able to manage VPCs, subnets, routes and route tables, gateways, and—of course—EC2 instances. These EC2 instances are booted from a set of AMIs (Amazon Machine Images, definitely pronounced “ay-em-eye” with three syllables) that are prepared and maintained by the CAPI project. In this short and simple post, I’ll show you how to influence the AMI selection process that CAPI’s AWS provider uses.

There are a couple different ways to influence AMI selection, and all of them have to do with settings within the AWSMachineSpec, which controls the configuration of an AWSMachine object. (An AWSMachine object is an infrastructure-specific implementation of a logical Machine object.) Specifically, there are these options for influencing AMI selection:

1. You can instruct CAPI to use a specific AMI with the ami field. (If this field is set, the other options do not apply.)
2. You can modify the lookup format used to 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

Creating Reusable Kuma Installation YAML

Using CLI tools—instead of a “wall of YAML”—to install things onto Kubernetes is a growing trend, it seems. Istio and Cilium, for example, each have a CLI tool for installing their respective project. I get the reasons why; you can build logic into a CLI tool that you can’t build into a YAML file. Kuma, the open source service mesh maintained largely by Kong and a CNCF Sandbox project, takes a similar approach with its kumactl tool. In this post, however, I’d like to take a look at creating reusable YAML to install Kuma, instead of using the CLI tool every time you install.

You might be wondering, “Why?” That’s a fair question. Currently, the kumactl tool, unless configured otherwise, will generate a set of TLS assets to be used by Kuma (and embeds some of those assets in the YAML regardless of the configuration). Every time you run kumactl, it will generate a new set of TLS assets. This means that the command is not declarative, even if the output is. Unfortunately, you can’t reuse the output, as that would result in duplicate TLS assets across installations. That brings me to the point of this Continue reading

Using the External AWS Cloud Provider for Kubernetes

In 2018, after finding a dearth of information on setting up Kubernetes with AWS integration/support, I set out to try to establish some level of documentation on this topic. That effort resulted in a few different blog posts, but ultimately culminated in this post on setting up an AWS-integrated Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm. Although originally written for Kubernetes 1.15, the process described in that post is still accurate for newer versions of Kubernetes. With the release of Kubernetes 1.22, though, the in-tree AWS cloud provider—which is what is used/described in the post linked above—has been deprecated in favor of the external cloud provider. In this post, I’ll show how to set up an AWS-integrated Kubernetes cluster using the external AWS cloud provider.

In addition to the post I linked above, there were a number of other articles I published on this topic:

• Setting up the AWS Cloud Provider
• Kubernetes, Kubeadm, and the AWS Cloud Provider
• Using Kubeadm to Add New Control Plane Nodes with AWS Integration

Most of the information in these posts, if not all of it, is found in the latest iteration, but I wanted to include these links here for some additional context. Also, 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

Kustomize Transformer Configurations for Cluster API v1beta1

The topic of combining kustomize with Cluster API (CAPI) is a topic I’ve touched on several times over the last 18-24 months. I first touched on this topic in November 2019 with a post on using kustomize with CAPI manifests. A short while later, I discovered a way to change the configurations for the kustomize transformers to make it easier to use it with CAPI. That resulted in two posts on changing the kustomize transformers: one for v1alpha2 and one for v1alpha3 (since there were changes to the API between versions). In this post, I’ll revisit kustomize transformer configurations again, this time for CAPI v1beta1 (the API version corresponding to the CAPI 1.0 release).

In the v1alpha2 post (the first post on modifying kustomize transformer configurations), I mentioned that changes were needed to the NameReference and CommonLabel transformers. In the v1alpha3 post, I mentioned that the changes to the CommonLabel transformer became largely optional; if you are planning on adding additional labels to MachineDeployments, then the change to the CommonLabels transformer is required, but otherwise you could probably get by without it.

For v1beta1, the necessary changes are very similar to v1alpha3, and (for the most part) are Continue reading

Technology Short Take 146

Welcome to Technology Short Take #146! Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve gathered a few technology-related links for you all. There’s some networking stuff, a few security links, and even a hardware-related article. But enough with the introduction—let’s get into the content!

Networking

• Denise Fishburne has a 7-part series on IPv6.
• Alec Muffett writes about DNS over HTTP over Tor, affectionately called DoHoT. As Alec shares in the article, it turns out that adding Tor to a “standard” DoH configuration doesn’t significantly impact performance (as measured by latency).
• Julia Evans recently released a tool named dnspeep to help folks understand how DNS works.
• Russ White shares Russ' rules for network design. I also really enjoyed his post on Keith’s Law.

Servers/Hardware

• Chris Mellor speculates that Cisco UCS may be on the way out; Kevin Houston responds with a “I don’t think so.” Who will be correct? I guess we will just have to wait and see.

Security

• Jimmy Mankowitz talks in some detail about using NSX-T in vSphere with Tanzu to secure applications.
• Here’s a conveniently compiled list of container CVEs.
• Lars Larsson discusses hardening Kubernetes beyond the NSA and CISA guidance.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• Tom Kravitz' Continue reading