Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

We have a lot of Red Hat servers in our data center environment, so we use this solution to manage the configuration, deploy and push configuration management. In addition, we use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate deployment tasks.

We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers. It is a configuration management tool, so we can easily manage our consistent configuration course over different Red Hat or Linux servers. We have not used Windows recently and are using only Linux now.

We like the GUI-based interface for the tower. Before, we only had a command-line interface to run all the Ansible tasks. Now, the Ansible tower provides the complete GUI functionality to run, manage, and create the templates and the Ansible jobs. This includes the code and YAML file we can create. The GUI interface is the added advantage of this solution, including some integration with the different plugins.

It should support more integration with different products. For example, it is for network security automation, and with the VMware product, they don't have an integration for NFTX right now. So they should include this integration capability so we can automate more tasks with this solution.

We have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform since 2021, and we are using version 3.2. It is deployed on-premises.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution and is based on your node license. We are using more than 400 servers right now, and it requires one senior system engineer for maintenance and deployment. We plan to increase the usage using Windows automation.

I rate the technical support an eight out of ten. 

We used a Puppet configuration in the past. We staged with Puppet and then moved to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The initial setup and deployment were easy, but the first two days of operations were a bit complex. We completed the deployment in-house.

There is a return on investment as a technical person. It has saved time and effort in maintaining the deployment environment. So on the technical side, it's saved lots of time and effort on the configuration.

I believe the cost per node basis is around $125 per node.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. Regarding advice, for the deployment, I would suggest working on inventory first. They should also consider their use cases and which workflow they want to implement. In the next release, they should have VMware tight interrogation.

We deploy the production environment using the provisioning for Terraform. We provision the cluster we need. If we need three or four nodes, like provisioning for hardware, OS provisioning, and bootstrap provisioning, we will use Terraform. After Terraform, we have to do any configuration changes. To install some packages, I do the cluster configuration changes and use Ansible with Terraform. I will integrate and deploy products based on the Ansible configuration files by writing playbooks.

There are many configuration management tools currently in the market. If there is a huge cluster, we use Chef. For minimum nodes, we use Ansible.

I'm using the latest version. It's version 2.13.4. The solution is deployed on AWS cloud.

I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes.

The solution requires some Linux knowledge.

I have worked with Ansible for eight years.

The solution is stable.

Scalability is not a requirement for this solution because it's a configuration management tool.

We also use Chef.

Setup is straightforward. There's no complexity. We had to learn some Linux information before setup.

The length of deployment depends on the nodes. It will show if everything is deployed or not, any changes, and if there are any failed nodes.

Security patching is enough for maintenance.

I installed the basic version myself. We also have the enterprise version, which is open source.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10. 

We use it for the bot. It helps to keep tracking all the automation processes that are ongoing in your ecosystem

It helps with patching and keeping everything compliant.

Automation tracking is the most valuable feature. 

The SSM connection access needs improvement because right now, they do everything through SSH.

I have been Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for a few years. 

The solution is very stable. 

If there's some cloud add ons, we would increase the usage. Only admins use the solution. 

We just create a server, and then we use that server to on-premesis.

Ansible has good performance. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We can use the solution for a group deployment if we have an infrastructure where we need to deploy software onto multiple machines at the same time. The tool should be on an Ansible server, and the server should be able to do SSH to the multiple hosts on which it wants to act.

We can automate a few host configurations using the product.

The solution must be made easier to configure.

I have been using the solution for almost five months. I am using the latest version of the solution.

The product is very stable.

The product is scalable. We can use it on multiple cluster levels.

The documentation is quite good. We don’t need to call anyone.

The initial setup is quite easy. The deployment took 15 to 30 minutes. The tool was deployed on a Linux machine. People deploying the solution must have some hands-on experience in Linux.

It’s an open-source tool.

I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is mostly automation. In technical terms, the solution uses a playbook. The playbooks contain code. If you have written all the code in the playbook, you just execute that code. You can automate depending on the environment.

The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful.

It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly for customers who aren't skilled in coding and don't know how to use the playbook's code. If we have many customers and the modules already exist, the user can just plug and play.

I have been using the solution for one year.

We don't have many issues with stability, so I rate the solution's stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. We have two customers using the solution.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is complex, and OpenShift would be much easier. It took a week to deploy the solution. When deploying the solution, you must download the installer and install the solution on the server.

It requires two engineers for maintenance and deployment.

Customers need to pay yearly for the license. The pricing is acceptable. It is not expensive.

If you know the basics of coding for you to write the playbook's code, and if you have a midrange environment with up to 1,000 servers, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good option to automate daily tasks.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I am using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as a part of the scale-up of the nodes in OpenShift.

Mostly, we use the solution for upgrading-related stuff.

The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless.

For my day-to-day operations, the one module that I am using is very good, and it is giving the intended results. Ansible has a lot of modules to perform your day-to-day activities. I don't think there will be room for improvement based on the current instances or use cases.

The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings. Thus, the solution's scalability has some room for improvement.

Though not much, I have experience with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for two years. I am a customer of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The initial setup for Ansible is very easy.

I'm not using the solution in this containerization. In the present environment, we are not using something like Red Hat Ansible Tower. We are using just an Ansible node which is something we use as a server for accessing all of our nodes and managing all of the nodes. Also, building an Ansible node as a bastion or jump host is a pretty easy task.

Actually, when you are building Ansible Tower, I think you need to go for the pricing. For other things, you don't need to do that, I guess. So it's a pretty good tool to automate your day-to-day or daily tasks or activities that can be done with Ansible. It has a lot of features, helping materials, and modules, which will be helpful in automating one's day-to-day jobs. It's pretty easy for us to upgrade and work with the nodes on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

If you go with any other tools, like Chef or Puppet, they are very hard to configure. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is agentless and pretty straightforward. It will reduce a lot of our headaches in general.

I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

I use the product mostly to configure virtual machines.

The solution helps us to have a standard configuration for all the virtual machines. It helps our virtual machines have the same configuration every time they restart. It also helps with automation.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work.

The product could do a better job at building infrastructure. 

The product should add a feature that alerts us if someone changes the configuration.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The product has high stability.

The solution has high scalability. It can be deployed on thousands of machines. Seven people in our organization use the solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We use the open-source version of the solution. The product can be used for free.

The tool should be used for server configuration but not for creating resources on the cloud. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We use the solution for provisioning on different providers like VMware, and OpenStack because it was so easy to implement. This product is also helpful to create a job workflow including the approval steps.

It also includes DevOps tools for making an easy automation process. 

It brings a lot of time-saving.

The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature.

I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for three months.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is very good. We asked the support team about applications, and they answered us. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used multiple tools in the past three years, but we did not use any other similar product to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The initial setup was easy. I was not a part of the deployment process, but my team members told me about the deployment process.

The in-house team asked the support team questions.

It is an open source product but needs a license subscription to use it. The price depends on the number of nodes supported by the platform (the nodes correspond to a host which can be for example a VM or a data center).

The price is really different depending on the customer's needs.

We have evaluated other solutions but this is the one that best meets our need for provisioning automation and addresses the different infrastructure and cloud providers we use

The product can be very easy to use, provided what you are using in it. I did not use the product myself, but it was really impressive when they showed the POC process. I rate it eight out of ten.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in our company to implement a software-defined infrastructure, which involves defining the desired configuration of machines in terms of their components, setup, security, user roles, software deployment, and certificate deployment. With this platform, we are able to set up new environments and manage the lifecycle of instances across various stages, such as development, production, and pre-production. We also use it for routing up and back of new software.

Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable.

I think some community projects support Ansible Playbooks, but they often break with version updates. It's a difficult problem to solve. DevOps should have a library with common components to make Ansible more productive when there are updates to Ansible and the operating system. What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis of reusing old Ansible scripts versus rewriting them from scratch after updates. The problem is that it becomes quite fragile over time, and this fragility is a problem.

If the IDE and auto-completion of the solution are based on Checkpt, it is important to ensure that the AI coding tools support writing in a more declarative way. While I have not yet tried coding with this assistance, Microsoft and Keylabs both offer AI coding assistants. The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding. It is crucial to see how well they work with the new versions of Ansible.

I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for almost five years. My company is an end-user of the solution.

The product's stability is very good. I rate it an eight out of ten.

Ansible is a configuration tool that doesn't have to scale like other tools. So scalability does not apply to the solution. Also, it's not a tool used by thousands of users. I am unsure if it can be used to manage thousands of servers. Small teams, like the DevOps team, use the solution. We service large groups of servers with it using a very small team of about two or three and a maximum of four people.

I have never contacted technical support. We use open-source support.

The solution's initial setup process was simple. The solution gets used in various ways, and it's essentially a configuration tool you run from any node with access to other nodes. It has got server versions as well. So, you can use it either way.

We compared it to other configuration management tools before choosing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. We did not choose others since they were not as centralized. It doesn't need a server since you can run it from your clients, and it doesn't need a central deployment service or server.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a declarative infrastructure management system that works fine if supported by the environments you use to set up. I rate the overall product an eight or nine out of ten.

I'm a software architect at a DevOps platform called Jihu. We use Ansible to provision Kubernetes clusters. For example, if the cluster has dependencies, we provision for the specific package manager version and dependencies, so they can scale for the CI/CD line. Ansible helps us provision the Kubernetes cluster for single-cloud or hybrid-cloud scenarios.

I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates. 

It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs. 

I have used Ansible for around four years. 

Ansible is stable as long as you have the connections between the machine and the server you use for all of this. 

Ansible has some built-in mechanisms to help you scale. There are different playbooks or steps. I have various multi-project partners that handle these kind of jobs, so I can do the provisioning simultaneously. Of course, we still need to do some prerequisites and there are dependencies between various jobs. 

I don't typically raise support tickets, but I frequently work with the Red Hat presales staff because we sell their solutions.

Setting up Ansible is straightforward because we use the Docker image. There may be some challenges if you have large-scale VMs. It's typically fine if we use configuration management for the credentials and SSH. If you want to use Ansible to provision VMs like TerraForm, then we need to clearly understand the mechanism. The time needed to deploy Ansible depends on the type of applications and infrastructure you're dealing with. It isn't only about the specs of the VM. The network speed and complexity also factor into it.

I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform seven out of 10.  I give it a seven in the Hong Kong context. It's about the culture, not the technology. Most of the infrastructure and network people in Hong Kong find it hard to accept a new solution, and it isn't easy to transform this kind of culture. They have one or two OEMs running on some simple web servers. Their teams are not familiar with the infrastructure cost calculators and configuration management stuff. 

We don't push them to use anything like this, but if they have lots of things they need to manage, then it's an opportunity for us to sell them solutions. We ask them questions. How many standard operations are you using? What is the approval flow? How long would take if you want to release or deploy applications? We make the case that they could shorten the time spent on SOP by eliminating manual work in the approval flow.