How to deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud
This blog is co-authored by Zack Kayyali and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad
Deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
The steps below detail how to install Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud from the marketplace. Before starting the deployment process, please ensure the Google Cloud account you are using to deploy has the following permissions. These IAM roles are required to deploy the Google Cloud foundation stack offering. The foundation stack offering here refers to the base Ansible Automation Platform 2 deployment.
This blog details how to deploy Ansible Automation Platform on Google Cloud, and then access the application. This deployment process will be configured to set up Ansible Automation Platform on its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that it creates and manages. We also support deploying into an existing VPC.
To begin, first log into your Google Cloud account. If you have a private offer, ensure that these are accepted for both the foundation and extension node offerings.
Note:
- The foundation offer refers to the “Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 - Up to 100 Managed Nodes” marketplace item.
- The extension node offer refers to the “Extension Node - Ansible Automation Platform 2 - 100 Managed Continue reading
How to use the new Constructed Inventory Feature in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
The New Constructed Inventory Feature
In this blog we introduced the idea for a new smarter way of handling inventory based on the Ansible constructed plugin. Now in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, we have introduced this as a fully supported feature and this blog aims to introduce you to it!
Constructed inventory is the successor to the existing Smart Inventory feature, and is now presented as another choice when creating an Inventory in Ansible Automation Platform controller. This will take a list of ‘normal’ inventories as input, perform user-defined operations, filter, and produce a resultant inventory with content from the input inventories.
What is Constructed Inventory?
The function is similar to the existing smart inventory - in that it allows users to run jobs against hosts in multiple inventories.
Constructed inventory however introduces new capabilities, including the built in ability to define and use both hostvars and groupvars:
- Groups are present in constructed inventory and play a key role in its configuration.
- User-defined logic (to add groups, vars, and down-select hosts) is run via ansible-inventory, which controller does for you, and is shown in the UI through an inventory update.
- The format of user-defined logic 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
How to deploy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on AWS to AWS GovCloud in the United States
This blog is co-authored by Zack Kayyali and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad
Deploying Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Foundation
The steps below detail how to install Ansible Automation Platform on AWS United States GovCloud from the AWS Marketplace. The steps to deploy into AWS GovCloud and AWS Commercial cloud are nearly identical. Before starting your deployment process, please ensure the AWS account you are using to deploy has the following IAM roles. These IAM roles are required to deploy the AWS foundation stack offering. The foundation stack offering here refers to the base Ansible Automation Platform 2 deployment.
This blog details how to deploy Ansible Automation Platform on AWS and access the application. This deployment process will be configured to set up Ansible Automation Platform in its own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that it creates and manages. We also support deploying into an existing VPC.
To begin, first log into your Commercial AWS account. If you have a private offer, ensure that these are accepted for both the foundation and extension node offerings.
Note:
- The foundation offer refers to the “Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 - Up to 100 Managed Nodes” marketplace item.
- The extension node offer refers to Continue reading
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
By Craig Brandt
At Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023, we announced Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a new generative AI service for Ansible automation. Today, we are thrilled to announce the Ansible Lightspeed technical preview launch.
In this blog, we’ll walk through the steps to access the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant technical preview service and get it up and running in your Visual Studio Code environment. Then we’ll share more about what you can expect from the experience and how to generate your first Ansible tasks with generative AI.
This is exciting stuff, so let’s dive right in.
Technical Preview: Empowering Ansible Users with AI
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant is a purpose-built generative AI tool that aims to streamline the creation of Ansible content. This capability is natively integrated into your VS Code editor via the Ansible VS Code extension. The AI capabilities are powered by Watson Code Assistant, a foundation model trained on Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, and other open sources of data.
The technical preview is open and available, free of charge, to all Ansible users. As more users engage with Continue reading
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
Welcome to the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant Technical Preview
At Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023, we announced Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a new generative AI service for Ansible automation. Today, we are thrilled to announce the Ansible Lightspeed technical preview launch.
In this blog, we'll walk through the steps to access the Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant technical preview service and get it up and running in your Visual Studio Code environment. Then we'll share more about what you can expect from the experience and how to generate your first Ansible tasks with generative AI.
This is exciting stuff, so let's dive right in.
Technical Preview: Empowering Ansible Users with AI
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant is a purpose-built generative AI tool that aims to streamline the creation of Ansible content. This capability is natively integrated into your VS Code editor via the Ansible VS Code extension. The AI capabilities are powered by Watson Code Assistant, a foundation model trained on Ansible Galaxy, GitHub, and other open sources of data.
The technical preview is open and available, free of charge, to all Ansible users. As more users engage with Ansible Lightspeed, the Continue reading
What’s New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.
This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!
Forward-looking Changes
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check out the module documentation for the minimum required version for each module.
New Python Support Policy
On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) v1 and AWS SDK for Python (boto3 and Continue reading
What’s New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
What's New with Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 6.0.0
When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production.
This blog post goes through changes and highlights what's new in the 6.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous bug fixes, features, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws Collection. Let's go through some of them!
Forward-looking Changes
New boto3/botocore Versioning
The amazon.aws Collection has dropped support for
botocore<1.25.0 and boto3<1.22.0. Most modules
will continue to work with older versions of the AWS Software
Development Kit (SDK), however, compatibility with older versions of the
AWS SDK is not guaranteed and will not be tested. When using older
versions of the AWS SDK, a warning will be displayed by Ansible. Check
out the module
documentation
for the minimum required version for each module.
New Python Support Policy
On July 30, 2022, AWS announced that the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS Continue reading
Using Kerberos for Windows in Ansible Automation Platform 2
Kerberos is often the preferred authentication method for managing Windows servers in a domain environment. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has allowed customers to leverage Kerberos authentication for a number of years now. So why revisit this subject?
Ansible Automation Platform 2 was released in July 2021 and was a major re-architecture of the platform. One of the fundamental changes was the introduction of automation execution environments - the use of containers to consistently package, distribute and execute Ansible Playbooks. Without going into the weeds, automation execution environments consist of a RHEL base image, Ansible Core and any dependencies required to execute our Ansible automation - these are typically Ansible Content Collections and Python libraries.
The move to containers means that we sometimes need to consider that localhost is now a container. There is an excellent blog post that goes into the details of how localhost isn’t what it seems when it comes to automation execution environments.
With all of this in mind, let’s go through a guided example of how to configure Kerberos authentication in Ansible Automation Platform 2, how to test the configuration and how to configure automation controller to use Kerberos.
Example configuration
Ansible for Disaster Recovery
Overview
When we get into the nuts and bolts of implementing a disaster recovery (DR) plan, an important step is to evaluate the tech stack that’s hosting the critical applications. The techstack oftentimes determines the order of operations and execution needed to effect the DR. Most organizations have the following tech stack pattern for their data centers:
Each of these layers has their own SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) who will need to work in tandem to address complexities and challenges during a DR event, and create a plan to ensure business continuity.
Challenges in creating a disaster recovery plan
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike Tyson
Cyber attacks, natural disasters, human error, server failure–any number of potential events can bring on the need for disaster recovery. While the risk of experiencing a disaster event won’t go away, the negative impact of such an event can be drastically minimized with the right planning.
The following is a sample SOP to recover an application during a disaster. Depending on the needs of the organization, DR procedures could be simpler or more complex than the examples shown here. After monitoring systems have detected conditions Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible is Here
As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat partners. Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.
If you are new to Event-Driven Ansible, check out the developer preview blog I wrote last fall to learn the basics, and you may also be interested in this video on Ansible Rulebooks, as well as others in this playlist.
Transform your work with Event-Driven Ansible
For many IT teams, there is too much work to do and not enough time to get it all done. Event-Driven Ansible can help your team work smarter, not harder. How often are you doing routine tasks that get in the way of key priorities? How often are you needing to “drop everything” to respond to a ticket enrichment request or handle a user administration issue? Have you had to wake up at night to remediate an issue? How often are Continue reading
Arriving soon: Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible
Since we announced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview at AnsibleFest last October, we have been working with a number of technology partners to provide integrated offerings via Ansible Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible. We know that partner integrations are an important source of event intelligence that can be used to create full end-to-end event-driven automation across your Day 2 operations.
Many of these integrations are in the area of event-source plugins that make it possible for Event-Driven Ansible’s decisioning capability to receive intelligence about a condition in the IT environment that needs a response.
Today at Red Hat Summit, as we announce Event-Driven Ansible as a capability that will be included in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, we are pleased to unveil the initial set of partners who are creating Ansible Content Collections for Event-Driven Ansible. Many of these will be Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections, and some partners are already in the certification process. Others are planned to certify in the near future. As each Collection is complete, subscribers can find and download them in Ansible automation hub.
Keep an eye out for further communication around new certified collections, and in the meantime, Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible is Here
As you may recall, we introduced Event-Driven Ansible in developer preview last fall at AnsibleFest. Since that time, much work has been done across the community, the Red Hat development teams, customers, and last but not least, Red Hat partners. Today, we are pleased to announce that Event-Driven Ansible will be concluding its developer preview and will become generally available as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.
If you are new to Event-Driven Ansible, check out the developer preview blog I wrote last fall to learn the basics, and you may also be interested in this video on Ansible Rulebooks, as well as others in this playlist.
Transform your work with Event-Driven Ansible
For many IT teams, there is too much work to do and not enough time to get it all done. Event-Driven Ansible can help your team work smarter, not harder. How often are you doing routine tasks that get in the way of key priorities? How often are you needing to "drop everything" to respond to a ticket enrichment request or handle a user administration issue? Have you had to wake up at night to remediate an issue? How often are you adjusting Continue reading
Event-Driven Ansible: Driving Innovations at the Edge
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases, helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. The introduction of Event-Driven Ansible is especially exciting when considering the impacts to edge environments.
Event-Driven Ansible at the edge
The edge can bring new challenges of limited or no IT staffing in remote locations such as branches, stores, warehouses, or plant floors. These remote edge facilities are often more focused on Operational Technology (OT), or small form factor IT devices.
Having a single platform to enable manually and automatically initiated actions across an entire technology landscape – from data center to cloud to edge – is critical to facilitating IT/OT convergence, a necessity in order to maintain competitiveness.
Ansible Automation Platform does not require an agent to be present on a target system receiving an automated action, which is convenient and ideal for technologies that cannot host an agent, such as an edge device or network router. This feature makes Event-Driven Ansible a simpler solution to deploy and more capable of handling automation at the edge.
Where do you start? Think big, Continue reading
YOU are the community
New year, new role, new strategy…2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best demonstrate to my customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way—a tool—that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down.
Many of you have stories just like mine. You are seeking out a way to simplify your daily tasks, so you can focus on the business. Just like me, you have decided that Ansible is the tool to do it. Before I started in this new role, I did some reflecting on my experience as part of the community. I have so many encouraging, positive, and fun stories I could share. Our Continue reading
YOU are the community
YOU are the community
New year, new role, new strategy...2023 is officially the year when I return to my roots. Back in 2014, I officially became part of the Ansible community. Admittingly, back then my focus was solely on figuring out how to best demonstrate to my customers the power of having a OpenStack private cloud. Anyone who has ever stood up or experimented with OpenStack knows that this is a tall order. Imagine having to stand up that platform over and over again on a daily basis. My focus was to find a way---a tool---that could help me do that, so I could focus on helping solve the customers' true challenges. Fast forward to now, and the decision to do it with Ansible still stands as the best choice hands down.
Many of you have stories just like mine. You are seeking out a way to simplify your daily tasks, so you can focus on the business. Just like me, you have decided that Ansible is the tool to do it. Before I started in this new role, I did some reflecting on my experience as part of the community. I have so many encouraging, positive, and fun Continue reading
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation.
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases by helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. Organizations are looking to extend a consistent automation experience across cloud, datacenter, and edge with the ability to scale in heterogeneous environments. Red Hat Ansible provides a common platform where organizations can build, run, and manage the entirety of their highly distributed systems, even to remote locations where network connectivity may be intermittent.
Because we understand how important edge automation is to teams looking to automate their entire IT landscape with a single platform, we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest Continue reading
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
Learn about Edge Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what's coming in IT automation.
Across every industry, automation at the edge is enabling emerging use cases by helping organizations drive the next wave of innovation as they explore and execute digital transformation initiatives. Organizations are looking to extend a consistent automation experience across cloud, datacenter, and edge with the ability to scale in heterogeneous environments. Red Hat Ansible provides a common platform where organizations can build, run, and manage the entirety of their highly distributed systems, even to remote locations where network connectivity may be intermittent.
Because we understand how important edge automation is to teams looking to automate their entire IT landscape with a single platform, Continue reading
Learn about Network Automation at Red Hat Summit and AnsibleFest 2023
As you may have heard, AnsibleFest will be taking place at Red Hat Summit in Boston May 23-25. This change will allow you to harness everything that Red Hat technology has to offer in a single place and will give you even more tools to address your automation needs. Join Ansible and automation-focused audiences to hear from Red Hat and Ansible leaders, customers, and partners while getting the latest on the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product roadmap, community projects, and what’s coming in IT automation.
Networks are integral parts of IT enterprises. Ansible Automation Platform’s simple framework means that p network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support networks all the way to the edge. . Because we understand how important network automation is to teams working in hybrid cloud environments, we have lined up some great sessions at AnsibleFest and Red Hat Summit:
Technology Short Take 168
Welcome to Technology Short Take #168! Although this weekend is (in the US, at least) celebrated as Mother’s Day weekend—don’t forget to call or visit your mom!—I thought you all might want some light weekend reading. I’m here to help, after all. To that end, here’s the latest Technology Short Take, with links to a variety of articles in various disciplines. Enjoy!
Networking
- Ivan Pepelnjak has been on a bit of a DHCP relaying kick. He’s recently published articles on DHCP relaying in VXLAN segments, DHCP relaying in EVPN VRFs, and most recently DHCP relaying with redundant DHCP servers.
- William Collins has a two-part series on site-to-site VPN with AWS. In part 1, Collins shows how VPN connections directly to VPCs don’t scale (both bandwidth-wise and operationally). In part 2, Collins shows how Transit VPC and Transit Gateway address scaling concerns.
- Daryll Swer talks about BGP zombie routes on JunOS.
- One notable challenge with Kubernetes is handling traffic outbound from the cluster and securing (or controlling) that traffic. Aadhil Abdul Majeed with Tigera reviews how using Calico Egress gateway and access controls enables users/operators to secure this outbound traffic.
Security
- Via Russ White, I came across an Continue reading