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My main use case for Red Hat Ansible, which is a disruptive solution. I think every large company today should have Red Hat Ansible because it helps a lot with the administration of large environments, operating systems, and servers. In a scenario where we increasingly need governance, security, and configuration focused on defense against cyberattacks, having a tool that allows you to make these changes atomically on many servers at the same time, even thousands of servers at once, is vital. Ansible does this excellently regardless of the operating system, whether Windows, Linux, or Mac. It also integrates easily with network devices, whether Cisco IOS or any other vendor. I think Ansible is a must-have tool for every large company that wants to remain relevant and secure.

A quick and specific example of a situation in which RedHat 9 with support by ProComputers, together with Ansible, brought concrete benefits to my operation is when I needed to apply zero-day patch fixes. It also applies to cases where a workaround is needed because the patch isn't available, but a configuration change in the operating system closes that door for the attacker. I have handled several situations like that with Ansible, and I managed to make my entire environment secure, with more than ten thousand servers secured with one click.

I think it is worth reinforcing that it is a must-have tool for medium and large companies, but especially for large ones.

RedHat Ansible has had a positive impact on my organization by reducing the total time for applying patches. It used to take weeks to complete, and today it is finished in a few hours.

This reduction in time improves productivity by allowing the team to use the free time to focus on more important and less operational activities.

The integration of Ansible makes my work easier and benefits the team because Ansible should enter a provisioning pipeline. When we talk about SDLC today, we also understand that infrastructure as code is part of the software development life cycle. By putting Ansible in the middle of this SDLC, I can create machines and configure them, which in short is everything we usually call the full set needed to prepare a server or any computing device, and I have the full cycle from start to finish. All of this is versioned in Git, where I can have it as my infrastructure-as-code repository.

I believe that a native integration with CMDB vendors could be useful to integrate and automatically create an inventory inside Ansible.

I would also like to mention the pricing; I believe it is an expensive tool.

I have been using RedHat Ansible for more than ten years.

RedHat Ansible is very stable; it is known precisely for its stability.

The scalability of RedHat Ansible is excellent as well; you can scale from single units up to tens of thousands if necessary, so it is easy.

The customer support of RedHat in Brazil is excellent, and the team is very competent. International support is also very good and very fast.

I would rate customer support an eight on a scale from one to ten.

Previously, we used a manual solution, and we switched to be faster at meeting market demands and to have the environment secure more quickly.

We have saved time, but we haven't exactly done an ROI calculation to know how much that returned financially. Still, as I said earlier, the security patching process that used to take weeks started to take only a few hours.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing could improve. I think it is a very expensive tool. The negotiation is good, the support is very good, and the Brazilian sales team is very capable, but it is an expensive tool.

Red Hat Ansible is the market leader for one single and exclusive reason: it is the best tool available for this, so it is a consensus.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate RedHat Ansible an eight overall.

I rate it an eight because I consider Ansible to have a high financial cost. It is not a cheap tool. A ten doesn't exist; there is no tool that deserves a ten.

It is implemented in my organization in a hybrid cloud format. In our hybrid architecture, we use Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI as cloud providers.

My advice for others who are thinking of using RedHat Ansible is to make sure to include it in your budget for next year.

I use LaunchDarkly for feature flags to turn on and off features that we deploy into production. I have also used LaunchDarkly to manage AI in production. We're using it for AI config, which are basically the prompts. So we are using it for flags and we also use it for the prompts, to store the prompts.

LaunchDarkly has helped me solve the challenge of iterating quickly on prompts and instructions. Having the instructions and prompts in LaunchDarkly makes it fast to iterate and just like flags, I can go into a UI and make the change, rather than having to deploy code, because the CI workflows tend to be a lot slower. We ended up wanting to have the instructions as code anyway, so we had to work on a specific pipeline to be able to still store that from our side as code and also publish it to LaunchDarkly. The main advantage is the same as the flag's flexibility—basically being able to change it quickly without having to actually wait for a PR to be merged and something to be deployed.

LaunchDarkly works well and it's nice to have the control of a feature flag as a whole. It's very handy. The only thing that I would like is a more structured way to visualize the flags, especially when you end up having too many flags and there is some hierarchy. The UI and the way that it is presented is very flat. When you end up having structures and dependencies on flags, there is no dashboard that would give you exactly what you want, especially when you're working on a particular project. Because the way that we have in our organization is that we have multiple products, multiple features and multiple teams that are working on features. You end up having a lot of different flags that are presented in a flat manner, and you may have a main one that when it is turned on, the child ones are evaluated based on it, and you may have many depths on that relationship. If there were a dashboard or a certain view that would make that structure apparent and very obvious, it would be useful.

Also, because you have different values depending on whichever environment that you're interested in, you have to actually dig into what are the relevant flags and then go to a particular environment that you are focused on. If there would be some sort of dashboard that would give you all of that as a whole, not individually by flag, but as a whole structure is constructed and your interest checked on, it would be handy from the flag side.

I would like to see all of the flags and their relationships and I would like to see a tree type view. As a developer, I may be working on a particular piece from a particular team. If I'm able to just group them the right way based on the hierarchy of the flag and just select the particular feature that I'm working on and only see that and see all of the hierarchy, and also see all of the values based on the environment that I am interested in at a glance, would be very handy and that would save a lot of time.

I have been using LaunchDarkly for maybe six months overall. I have been working in my current field for seventeen years.

There was one time that there was an outage, and we had to act on it because the default that we were getting actually ended up breaking some other feature.

I am not aware of any performance issues, but I am aware of one time that there was an outage and we had to act on it to fix it.

We have a thread in Slack where we are raising issues directly to LaunchDarkly support. I'm not really involved in that, but I do know that this thread exists.

I have used an in-house solution previously. Comparing to that, LaunchDarkly is very feature rich, but it's basically because we were doing it ourselves. We are also using LaunchDarkly for AI configuration and that also seems intuitive, but it also ends up suffering from the same symptom of having everything be very flat. We have been having issues with certain variations of AI config being too large. There is a certain limit that LaunchDarkly imposes on how much you're able to post as a variation for an AI config. We have been having a lot of issues with that recently. We did a migration from the in-house solution to LaunchDarkly.

I didn't actually do the platform part, but from my point of view, I was just moving existing flags to be in LaunchDarkly flags. I didn't do any work regarding that, but because it was already taken care of, I was just using the flags.

There's a platform team that is taking care of the maintenance side, so it doesn't require maintenance on my end.

I wouldn't be in the position to actually compare metrics, but LaunchDarkly seems to be pretty performant. The client in the browser gets the events fairly quickly.

I give LaunchDarkly a rating of eight out of ten overall for everything.