Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

We use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to configure our infrastructure. It is mainly used to configure the whole activity.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good choice when you have different distribution platforms. If you have an infrastructure with Ubuntu, VPN, and Red Hat distributions, Ansible can integrate these platforms through a small inventory file, such as a custom image or file.

The role-based access control (RBAC) feature is the most valuable, especially when used with Azure Galaxy Infinity.

Ansible is good at managing applications or devices on the existing infrastructure but cannot provision those devices.

The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect.

I have been using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for three years. We're using the latest version of the solution

The solution’s stability is good. I rate it a ten out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a ten out of ten.

The customer service and support are good. It is good if you know how to create and operate it, but it can be difficult for someone who does not have the knowledge of how to configure the YAML file. There is some technical difficulty here. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have seen an ROI as we are still using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

The pricing is okay.  

I would definitely recommend using the solution. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution for all kinds of automation, network automation, compliance security, software installation, and software configuration. I started using the solution as a configuration management tool, and now I also use it for automation. I also use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform within the CMP platform Morpheus.

The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation.

The solution should add a nice self-service portal.

The standard single-node installation is easy. When you have a protection grade installed, and the customer wants DR, it creates a problem. For example, if you have the database built in, but the customer wants to use RDS, you have to tweak it. Then, you have to use the governance policies and everything accompanying them. Some customization takes place, but overall, it's easy if vendors use a straightforward method.

I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for many years.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a very stable solution. I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform an eight out of ten for stability.

Around 10 users use the solution in our organization, a presales and sales company. Around 1,000 users used the solution in my previous organization.

I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's initial setup is not it's not hard. The steps to install the solution seem to be easy.

Users have to pay a per-node cost of around $ 100 per node. The solution's pricing depends upon the volume.

Users have to lay out how they want to build the solution. They should first build smaller job templates and then add them together to build workflow job templates.

Overall, I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten.

Our company uses the solution for clients with private or multi-cloud platforms. The solution automates the process of integrating multi-cloud applications. 

We have more than 1,000 users across our clients. 

The automation manager is very good and makes things easier for customers with multi-cloud platforms. 

Additional features could be added. 

I have been using the solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable and you can go from 100 to 3,000 users with no issues. 

I did not previously use another solution. 

The setup is very easy.

Management is a bit different day to day as you automate. It takes time to realize all the benefits. Two staff people can easily manage the solution. 

We replaced our partner server with SaaS.

The pricing is pretty standard. 

I am very picky about using the solution. For my client base, there are many benefits to use. The solution is the continuous choice. 

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

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 to configure operating systems, apply security, and for day-to-day management. Our use cases include collecting information from end nodes, rather than writing shell scripts or any other types of scripts, as was done historically, and rather than even logging in manually and collecting information from the nodes. These days, you write an Ansible playbook and it does things for you. And if you don't have a playbook, you can simply gather the facts from the nodes, and that's available out-of-the-box without writing anything. You simply utilize the Ansible modules.

Our Ansible deployment is for a hybrid environment. We have on-premises services that we use Ansible to configure as well as cloud instances.

Historically, lots of things had to be orchestrated manually. There weren't any great tools to do configuration management across multiple nodes. IT servers were physical but then moved into virtual, and with that change came the need to manage more and more nodes. It became quite time-consuming, and employing people to manage hundreds or thousands of servers wasn't really a great solution. Ansible, as an orchestrator, has filled the gap. It allows you to manage an almost unlimited number of nodes with a single body. That has been a great improvement in the way organizations manage their estates.

In addition, we're able to configure or deliver something to our end nodes step-by-step. You can have dependencies, types of conditions, between steps. For example, if something isn't present or it's not happening on that node, you can skip steps and move to another one. This ability definitely helps. In the past, a lot of things had to be done manually or with a semi-manual script. Ansible automates those things. As long as you've got your playbook written up and tested correctly, you can run it with confidence against your production system.

Ansible also saves us time when it comes to service deployment, moves, and updates. If we consider the effort involved in writing playbooks, and the effort to deploy them, Ansible saves 80 to 90 percent when it comes to the time involved in these scenarios.

Another advantage is that Ansible enables collaboration across teams. We're transparent. Whatever we deliver needs to be backed by the code. That code lives in source control. Anybody who is capable and wants to could grab that code. Playbooks are an example. They could simply apply them against the target. This is a form of collaboration, where one person does something and another can grab it and use it. Obviously you need source control, but multiple people can work on a specific project together and can have influence on that project, providing updates, features, and bug fixes to the project.

We have certainly seen an improvement in automation. With Ansible, you can pretty much automate everything. You work on a desired state. And we have been able to apply current, modern security standards to the estates. From a security perspective, our servers are now fully compliant with modern security standards. We are able to use Ansible to run some benchmarks against them to see if they're fully compliant.

Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate. Managing a Windows or Microsoft estate via Ansible is a little bit different and I believe that requires the installation of some agents.

Another advantage is that Ansible did not require us to change our existing infrastructure in any way. This issue ties in with the SSH connectivity. You don't have to prepare any infrastructure to use Ansible. When you provision an operating system, that SSH remote connection is available. It's embedded in the operating system. That means you don't have to enable anything. All you have to do is make sure you can reach the nodes, either via SSH, passwordless authentication, or possibly other mechanisms. We've only been using SSH, and it does the job very well.

Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible. 

Also, some of the Ansible versioning or backward compatibility, or Python changes, could have been handled a little bit better. 

But all these challenges could potentially be offset by the way you use Ansible. For instance, you could have Ansible Docker-ized and that would make your Ansible environment fixed and static and fully controlled. That way you wouldn't be worried about your server or your local workstation that is used for deployment.

These aren't huge issues, they are just things to keep in mind, but it all depends on how you use the product.

I have been using Ansible for a good few years. I started five to seven years ago, by first writing Ansible playbooks, simply to orchestrate configuration management of the estate at that time. I was mainly using it on Linux servers.

The stability of Ansible is great. Historically, we have had some compatibility issues, such as during a Python change a library had to be downgraded. Other than that kind of minor issue, the product has been very stable.

It's quite scalable. I don't think there are huge limits in terms of what you can do. I have not run any performance benchmarks for Ansible. I don't know how long it would take to upgrade 10,000 nodes compared to competitors. But I feel Ansible could be nicely scalable. An orchestrator would allow you to simply have Ansible containers, perhaps on Kubernetes, and they would run something against the nodes. Having multiple Ansible nodes, or multiple pods of Ansible containers, running code against targets in parallel, would be a scenario in which I could hardly imagine any limits.

We are managing between 1,000 to 2,000 servers.

My team is more of a development team, so we don't run Ansible on a daily basis for operations. We mostly program or develop robots that run Ansible when needed. As for other teams, I'm not sure how they use it, but whenever they need to collect something from these hosts or need to quickly push a similar update to all hosts, I think they would use Ansible. While it's not being used on a daily basis in our organization, it's certainly being used.

The typical Red Hat support, the kind you access via their portal or email, can vary. Sometimes things are not done as quickly as you would want, but it's standard support and you get what you pay for. Moving up a level, if you were to get TAM support, things would improve a bit because you get dedicated technical contacts with whom you speak on a weekly basis. They help push things along. However, you're still tied to the Red Hat backlog and its engineering, which is not always the fastest. Often they have a different view and different priorities. We have had some cases where they have simply said, "We're not delivering this. We're not doing this," but they did not provide a rationale as to why. 

Overall, the results are mixed when it comes to support. It's not that bad, but there's room for improvement.

Neutral

I've used Puppet a little bit, but I quickly moved into Ansible as it became a standard over Puppet, Chef, and perhaps SaltStack. We moved quickly into Ansible. When Ansible was acquired by Red Hat, it quickly became a very interesting product. The first bullet point was the agentless infrastructure for Ansible.

Red Hat's open-source approach was also a factor for me, certainly. I'm an open-source enthusiast. It's a big plus that Ansible is an open-source project, and it's free. They gained popularity from that as well.

When you need to use Ansible, you need to grab the Ansible binary. A typical method in Linux would be to use the Package Manager to install it. You could also use a Python-native method for installing it through pip.

Another good method would be to simply get your Ansible Docker-ized or pull a Docker image from a third-party repository and that image would have Ansible deployed in it. That way, every time you need to run Ansible, you could just an image and that image would provide the binary for Ansible.

The next step is related to your particular use case, what you need to use and how you need to use it. For example, if you want to write a small portion that does something, you simply instruct Ansible to use that code against the targets. By "targets" I mean you need to provide an inventory that you want to run your code against.

Another step that needs to happen in order to use Ansible nicely is to set up passwordless authentication to use SSH keys instead of passwords. That's what should probably happen together with installing or delivering Ansible binaries. Once you have these elements, binaries and authentication, your system is pretty much ready to be configured through Ansible.

Because I'm quite senior and specialized in Red Hat and, in general, a Linux expert, deploying Ansible literally takes me minutes.

Implementation strategy would vary from case to case, but one of the popular ways of deploying Ansible is to have a bastion host that allows you to access your estates over SSH keys and simply have Ansible running from that host. Ideally, you would like to see what Ansible is changing on every run so a good practice would be to have CI/CD orchestration for Ansible, using Jenkins or another CI/CD tool that allows you to keep historical logs on how Ansible behaves, and what has changed in an estate during an Ansible run. That would be the minimal implementation I would suggest for an organization.

We're not paying for it, but if you were to buy it, you would get Ansible Tower. That is what they are charging for, if I recall correctly.

Ansible seems to have been quite well received. There are competitors, or there were when I started using it several years ago, but Red Hat, with community development, has become the easiest to use, compared to Puppet or Chef. That is how Ansible gained popularity across the IT market.

Another element in why Ansible became so popular is the way things are being pushed to the end nodes. We're using existing SSH connectivity, which is a common way to manage Unix servers. That became available out-of-the-box. The competitors usually ask you to install agents and that brings with it challenges, such as how to orchestrate installing agents. Ansible does not suffer from that problem. Every Unix server must have SSH enabled by default and Ansible simply uses that.

It's a great tool. It's easy to use. Do your own research and run a spike to compare Ansible with competitors and simply pick whatever suits you. But a great plus for Ansible is its simplicity.

For doing basic things, or things Ansible was designed for, you probably don't need special coding skills. All you likely need to know is how to properly structure a YAML file, and YAML is now a common language across development. However, if you were to do things that are a little bit more advanced in Ansible, Python would be something that you would want to study or be good at. That would help you write custom Ansible modules or provide further input into existing development to improve them or deliver additional bug fixes and features.

We spike the open-source version of Ansible Tower, and Tower is not difficult to learn if you have experience with Ansible and with Unix. Deployment of it is relatively easy. We have not found a great use case for it, to be honest. At that time, it was more for compliance and, maybe, a Chrome-job type of product, and we had the orchestration for that already.

When it comes to SLAs, I don't think Ansible has created a great change for us. Once you achieve a certain level of automation in an organization, you're probably not going to feel any changes when it comes to SLAs because you have already built that capability. Our SLAs are well maintained and are at a high standard, but I don't feel Ansible has had a huge influence on them because we were mature in that area. But perhaps for some organizations, it would have a significant effect on what they offer. Being able to do more via automation means services are up more than they might have been.

We are using other Red Hat solutions in our environment, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Satellite, and we have also used Red Hat Virtualization. All of these products integrate nicely with Ansible. It's mainly because they're fully backed by variations or just pure Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The integration is great. Whatever you can do on Linux, can probably be done on any other Red Hat products that are based on similar technology. There are no limits.

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.

We primarily use this solution for network configuration pushes. We use scripts from Ansible to push configurations to specific devices such as routers.

The best features are the orchestration and flexibility of the solution.

It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well.

I've been working with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for a year.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable.

I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten.

It's a scalable solution. The capacity of the single instance is quite enough to hold up an enterprise. From a resilience perspective, you have to have a cluster that actually holds the whole thing.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate scalability at seven.

I would rate technical support at nine out of ten.

Positive

Once all of the components are in place, there are no issues with the initial setup. I would rate the initial deployment process at seven out of ten.

The deployment can take two days to a week depending on the requirements and resources available.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an expensive solution. There may be additional fees to use advanced features.

I would highly recommend Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, especially to organizations that are moving toward a cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Overall, I would rate this solution at seven on a scale from one to ten.

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. 

Positive

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.