Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

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. 

My use cases with Ansible include configuring network devices. That is what I used it for when I was first learning Ansible. I then automated PKI (public key infrastructure) compliance. That particular domain has different servers and I developed an automation solution, using Ansible, to automate the configuration of the PKI servers. And for the last eight or nine months, I have been working on automating cloud solutions, such as deploying services or upgrading or migrating to a specific version of a product.

I am working on a client network, and that client also has clients who are hiring our client for hosted services, such as websites or internal applications for their employees or for their end-users. All the database-related activities and operations are being handled by our client. What I am doing, in that context, has to do with patches. There are patch releases, or bundles, or package upgrades, but the developers of those packages can't go and directly upgrade the particular sites of every customer. So we have developed an automation solution for them, using Ansible, that can directly trigger these processes. They can point out that "this is the package," and our automation in the backend, using Ansible, takes care of it.

It's a tool to automate different domains and Ansible can reduce human efforts for two domains in particular. One is DevOps and the other is network automation.

It's a total automation tool. Where you might need 100 employees to do a certain type of work manually, by developing Ansible modules, that type of work can be done by one employee. It just requires a simple SSH to the target nodes and then you can do whatever you want.

We had a scenario, the public key infrastructure project, in which there were multiple components. Some of my colleagues had automated some domains, such as a firewall domain. We then needed to integrate components, the firewall servers and the PKI servers, so that they could communicate with each other, and for security purposes. Ansible helped with that.

When you compare a process done by Ansible with human effort, there is a large time-reduction ratio. In a scenario involving networking, if it is done manually, the human effort will involve logging in to the system, entering user credentials, installing software, and configuring it to make the system ready. If there are 100 such systems, we would need to do the same process to all 100 systems, one by one. Whereas with Ansible, you just need to configure the IP addresses of those systems and, with one click, your job is done.

And when we integrate Ansible with a CI/CD tool, like Jenkins or Bitbucket, that reduces service deployment time by more than one hour. Also, we have site deployment where we require multiple servers. For example, when we have a database server, it needs many other components as well. When we deploy all those services manually, using a UI or a console in the cloud, it takes more than 10 hours to deploy one site. With Ansible, we automate that task once and it can do it in an hour, and the site will be provisioned successfully.

One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything.

If you are good at Python and willing to customize Ansible modules, you can develop Ansible modules and, at one go, you can automate whatever you want.

When I started learning Ansible, I didn't know Python or any other programming language. But even so, I was easily able to understand what Ansible is doing and how I should write a playbook so that Ansible executes its tasks properly and the results are met, per my requirements. It's a simple English language and YAML script. Even folks with a non-IT background can write Ansible playbooks.

I have also been using Ansible Tower for about six months. It is nothing but a GUI version of, or experience with, Ansible. Ansible itself is a simple CLI tool, but with Ansible Tower there is a GUI, similar to Windows and Linux. There are a number of Ansible Tower servers, so if you want to run playbooks on multiple systems or you want to run multiple playbooks at the same time, you can do so using Ansible Tower. It is very dynamic. It's very easy to use. Even a non-IT employee or a non-IT student can understand Ansible Tower. The UI is very simple. Moreover, it has LDAP, Active Directory, and many other integrations, by default.

Suppose you have set something up, that you have pushed some code to the repo. Even your colleagues can test it using Ansible Tower. Or suppose I have run an Ansible Tower job and I am facing an issue with it. I can give a colleague the job ID and ask them to have a look and help me resolve it. That type of process is very easy, as Ansible Tower is like a common infra for employees to work together. 

Ansible Tower provides a central solution for automation. For example, in the previous project I worked on, we were automating some domains. Then we provided the sandbox URLs to the client for them to test whether the code the vendor had provided was working properly. They were able to run it in different ways with Ansible Tower. They used the Ansible Tower jobs with which we tested things for reference. Ansible Tower is a kind of UI dashboard for Ansible end-users. That is an added advantage of Ansible Tower: Whatever Tower jobs you have run are saved in Ansible Tower.

The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that.

I have been using Ansible for approximately one and a half years.

I believe no other tool can match the stability of Ansible. It is an agentless tool; it is SSH. Other comparable tools, like Puppet, Salt, and Chef, all require some kind of agent on the target node. Ansible only requires a Python dependency, which is very common in any operating system.

It's very scalable. If there were a graph showing scalability, Ansible would be at the peak on that graph.

I have not used Red Hat's technical support specifically for Ansible, but when learning Ansible I used their partner program and I felt it was the best.

When I started in automation, Ansible was the first tool I used.

The initial setup of Ansible is very straightforward. There are no dependencies. You just run a simple, single line command and your Ansible is ready. It hardly takes two minutes.

If you only need to use Ansible, it's free for any end-user, but when you require Ansible Tower, you need to pay per Ansible Tower server.

Apart from the fact that Ansible is agentless and open source, it's the best because you only require an IP and the credentials of any target server, and half of your work is done.

Ansible is an open-source tool, so it can be integrated with any of the cloud services, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, very easily.

Based on my experience, I would suggest that anyone starting out with Ansible be familiar with SSH commands and Linux administration. That should be more than enough for Ansible beginners.

We use Ansible for automation. It is integrated with Datavations. When we start Datavations, it calls the Ansible tower, which executes tasks like automated checks between the servers. We also use Ansible when we need to patch or upgrade our software.

Ansible has saved us lots of time. Previously, it took us much longer to deploy or make changes across systems. 

I like the fact that Ansible is agentless.

The support could be better. 

We have used Ansible for three or four years.

Ansible seems steady. It's stable all the time.

I rate Ansible eight out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Ansible support eight out of 10. I rarely use them. It isn't the worst, but the response time could be better. 

I rate Ansible 10 out of 10 for ease of deployment. Deploying Ansible was straightforward and only takes about a minute. It starts with the CI/CD process, and it's automated so that when there is a change to the code, the changes are applied across servers or applications.

I rate Red Hat Ansible 10 out of 10. I recommend Ansible. It's easy to use. 

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 had a lot of manual labor. We had patching that was a manual process, and we had configuration drift. There were a lot of touch points. There were parts of the business where we knew that there could be a faster deployment and much quicker development and production. Ansible has increased our speed of deployment. We have a source of truth now. It has sped everything up, and it has saved a lot of people's time.

We've got on-prem and cloud deployment. We've got it in AWS, and we've got a proof of concept in Azure. We are looking at Azure SaaS, but at the moment, we don't know which way that would go.

We're realizing its benefits on a daily basis now. The biggest issue that we've had has been changing the way people work. We have a lot of people doing the work, and they all had a certain way of working. There were a certain set of tools that they used. We had to gradually migrate all of the tools that they were using to be more automated. There was a lot of code and a lot of tools on people's individual machines or shared drives. For example, User 1 had all of his applications and tools on his machine, and he might also have had some small scripts that he wrote personally on his machine. When User 2 came along, he didn't get to see what User 1 had because all of the scripts were on his machine. By automating more, we've put all of our code into a central repository so that everybody who is a member of that repository can see everyone's code. Nobody is siloed anymore. We have a lot more collaboration. There is a lot more progressive thinking in the way people are working. It is not where a bit of code is written for one specific purpose. It is always adaptable by just changing variables, etc.

It has effectively sped up everything from our sandpit environment to our full CI/CD process and our end deployment. Previously, we had to build everything manually in the sandpit. We had to build everything manually in the test environment, and we had to build everything manually in the production environment. Because we have environments that are matched all the way through, now, after we've built something in the sandpit, we can just promote that code. So, the copying of that code through various platforms has been eliminated with the use of Ansible and our repository system.

It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left.

Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen.

There should be a more adaptive search feature. For example, if you had the name Mr. Smith, and you type in Smith, sometimes, it doesn't find Smith. You've to type Mr. first and then Smith. The search feature has certainly taken a little bit of a step backward from what we were used to in Ansible Tower.

I feel if we took this to the customer now and asked the customer to start using the product as it is, we'd be getting a lot of pushback because as an automation platform, it feels as if it is very early in its life cycle and development. I know that within Red Hat, a lot of the tests that they perform are automated tests. Somebody doesn't necessarily sit at the GUI. When you speak to Red Hat, they always say that a lot of the customers don't use the GUI. They might have got a front end or some sort of ServiceNow provider that runs all these jobs, but the search and job updates are the main challenges at this time.

It has been five years with Ansible Core and three years with the Red Hat Ansible Tower offering.

Its stability has been good. There are odd glitches within Ansible AAP, but within Core, there are no problems.

It is scalable. We just add more nodes if we need them.

It is used at multiple locations and in multiple departments, and our end users have multiple operating systems. There are probably over a hundred thousand users. We're going to put some more nodes in at some point in the future.

Their technical support has been good. Because we're a big organization, we have our own allocated SME within Red Hat, and we normally liaise with him. The Ansible support itself has been okay if we need to raise a ticket, but we're usually raising tickets just to get something on their system. We normally speak with the SME allocated to us, and he has been excellent. Our SME is called Pat, and I would rate him a ten out of ten. 

I would rate the support team within Red Hat an eight out of ten. The trouble is that if you raise a support case with Red Hat, they don't appreciate how much experience a specific customer has got or how much troubleshooting they've already done. So, the first thing they do is they'll ask for a basic set of files, which is understandable, but when we've already passed that point where we've already done all the checks, instead of going in at the first line, we need to go in at the third line to get something resolved. That's where Pat picks it up.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously. There has been a scattering of other automation tools around, but nothing that had physically been a business directive. It was always bash scripts, secure CRT scripts, etc. They were just scattered everywhere. There was no semblance of order. If we had anything, it could be a guy that was working two days a week, but you never knew what day he was working or who was supporting it. We had nothing like that other than Puppet.

The main factor for going for Ansible was that within our environment, there were already a lot of people who had Ansible engine experience or had worked with Ansible Core. Ansible is an easy-to-use language. It is very easy to pick up, and you can start automating quite quickly with Ansible. It is not as complicated as Python or anything like that. There is ease of use. It is not like writing Python code where there is a lot out there, but there is no front-end GUI that we could bring users into quite quickly. It is not as scary because you can look at the GUI, and you can click around and run jobs within the GUI. You don't need to have any deep Python experience or complicated Ansible coding experience. Once you've got a playbook in your repository, you can just run it from the web front end, and we couldn't find anything else that had a web front end like that.

It has got a big community. There are always people out there writing new modules, and you've got Ansible Galaxy, and you've got Ansible Collections where one is vendor-provided and one is community-provided. It is just very progressive. 

It was straightforward. The deployment took about a week.

We liaised with Red Hat. For Tower, we followed the deployment guide, and for the automation platform, we followed the upgrade process. We fed back any issues we had to Red Hat, and they were quick to resolve them.

There are ten people on our team, but not all of them were involved in deployment. It is a two or three-man job. We're all engineers.

In terms of maintenance, we have regular maintenance windows. Whenever there is a new version of AAP, we update it. We obviously run all our Linux patches on a regular basis, and we always sit and wait till we've done some testing on Ansible before we update the Ansible version on that box. There are ten people on our team, and we normally just pick slots between us so that the same person is not doing the same maintenance window all the time. The majority of it is automated, and it is just a case of somebody sitting in and checking that the job has run, and there haven't been any issues.

At the moment, it is just time saved.

I don't see the pricing or licensing features, but from what I understand, it is fairly reasonable.

Don't be narrow-minded. Don't be put off by adopting something that you've never worked with before. There is plenty of documentation out there to help you. It has a thriving community, and there is plenty of information online. Red Hat's documentation is also very good. You can get yourself up and running across a variety of platforms quite quickly by just looking at the Ansible site.

I would rate it a nine out of ten because there are a few quirks with the GUI at the moment. I would've rated Ansible Tower a ten out of ten. 

We use Ansible for infrastructure code. We also use CloudFormation. 

Ansible provides a central solution for automation for our customers.

We deploy this solution on AWS. We are a cloud company so that is why we don't have anything on-premises. We prefer a cloud approach, and we have almost everything in GCP or in AWS. The solution hasn't required us to change our existing infrastructure. We are using the server version 17. We use Ansible plus Ansible Tower, which is Ansible AWS.

The solution is user-friendly for our staff, although some activities are unique and are not being repeated several times, so we need to do those things manually.

We have around 25 people doing this same job. Before using this solution, we had more than 100 people for the same amount of work. This solution has definitely helped us to reduce and optimize our efforts.

One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks.

The language is very intuitive. The solution is easy to learn. The solution enables us to deliver incrementally. We are able to expand this facility by implementing more templates and using them digitally.

We are an international company, so we use this solution with a collaborative approach internationally. 

The solution enables us to enforce the same security settings, so it's quite easy to maintain. There can be human mistakes, which can make security unreliable, so that is why we prefer this security policy.

We would like support for the post-integration of this product before cloud frameworks because right now their approach is to avoid using on-premises activities and move everything to the cloud. This is why we choose Ansible, but we would like Ansible to stay as close as possible to recent trends coming through AWS, for instance. We have a chance to automate those processes by using Ansible, so there is interoperability of those products.

I have been using this solution since 2015.

The solution is stable.

The solution has reduced the amount of downtime for users. It can automate some maintenance activities, which are out of operating time. If those activities can be automated, that can dramatically reduce downtime. If those activities can't be re-automated, then it's semi-automated, which would mean human effort plus automation together. In general, yes, we can automate maintenance or downtime activities, but that depends on the input for this. If there is some sort of disaster, then there would be a different approach.

Technical support is very good, especially from Red Hat.

We have used Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudFormation.

CloudFormation is like a showcase of our service catalogs. We provide that to our customers. It's tightly integrated with Ansible and frameworks. The customer can choose from the service catalog, and if it's automated, the customer can see how much it was from a cost point of view. CloudFormation reduces work activities on the ground.

Initial setup was complex.

To deploy everything from the Red Hat portfolio took one week per customer.

Our strategy combines very closely with cloud, which is why our approach is complex. We are trying to persuade and migrate customers to the cloud, AWS, or GCP, and as an additional value, we can automate and more or less migrate it to an environment to bring new approaches and make this cloud solution beneficial to customers.

Yes. We saw ROI three or four years after implementing the solution.

You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it.

We also bought this solution because it was better than some competitors, like Puppet and Chef, and because of the automation.

It has helped our organization save time when it comes to service deployment, moves, and updates. We used to have 120 employees, and now we have just 25 for the same amount of activities.

I would give this solution 10 out of 10. 

The lesson I've learned is that automation is the way because without automation, it's quite impossible right now to maintain a very large environment, especially in public clouds like AWS or GCP.

We're quite unique because we use the public cloud environment together with one product.

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.

Basically, Ansible is a configuration management tool. Mainly, I've been using Ansible for making changes and for deployments, such as of web servers. I also use it for servicing instances, mostly from AWS. I use AWS Cloud, and I configure the instances that I've launched.

Recently, I've also created an Ansible role. Basically, you can contribute to Red Hat in the form of an Ansible role. Everybody can share their code with just simple commands, such as Ansible Galaxy. With a few commands, we can share each other's infrastructure.

It helps us to create an environment. I'm a student. As students, when we get into newer technologies, we can't share our infrastructure with each other, and it gets difficult to explain to everybody. For example, I want to tell my friend to do certain things so that his infrastructure is similar to mine. In such a case, I'll just create a playbook from Ansible, and I'll just share it with him. He will just run that playbook, and we both will have the same infrastructure. 

It doesn't require us to change our existing infrastructure in any way. We just need Ansible software on the managed host. So, it just needs to have Ansible. The host with which we are going to connect should have the Python interpreter installed, and nothing else. 

It saves time when it comes to service deployment, moves, or updates. We have created playbooks, which are very easy to create. They are scripts in Python. A playbook also acts as a documentary for you. You can refer to a playbook any time, and it definitely saves a lot of time. It gives very good results in a long run. You just have to invest time in creating the first playbook. After that, you just use it. While creating a playbook, you can specify keywords by using Ansible variables. For example, to launch an instance in AWS Cloud, I need to specify a name to it. If I need to launch two to three instances at once, I will create a variable for it and pass it externally through the Ansible playbook. Next time, you can change the keyword and run the playbook.

Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible. 

Its dynamic inventory capability is very useful. For example, we are provisioning instances in AWS, and I want a particular name tag. My name tag is my instance, and I've been running a lot of instances in AWS Cloud. If I want, I can filter and configure all instances running with a specific name. I can also dynamically fetch IPs. What happens in the AWS cloud is that if you shut your operating system down, and you do some reboot and stuff like that, then you'll lose the public IP. Being able to dynamically fetch IP is the main capability that I like in Ansible.

It is very easy to use. Anybody who has studied computer science or is from the mathematical field can easily use Ansible. You just have to know how to do a certain task. For example, if you want to make some changes to your firewall and maybe set up a web server, you don't have to know all the commands with respect to different operating systems such as Linux and Windows. You don't need to know commands, and you just need to have a basic idea about how you want to do it. It is very easy to use. You just have to know how to do it.

Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules.

I've been using Ansible for about one and a half years.

It is quite stable. It has been good so far. I didn't find any bugs. 

We do our operating system-related configurations and router configurations by using Ansible. I am focusing on operating system-based configuration because I use it in the operating system, and it has been quite stable.

It is scalable. You just need to know the IP address of the new operating system with which you are going to interact. You just need to enter credentials into Ansible inventory. You have to make entries to this inventory, and you are good to go. You can use the same configuration that you have been using in your previous host.

I have not interacted with their technical support because I didn't come across any issues from Red Hat's side. It has been stable, and there was no need to contact them.

There is an open-source community of Red Hat and Ansible Galaxy where users contribute. I've contributed two to three times. 

I just started using Puppet and Chef. The main thing where Ansible stands out is that you don't need to make any changes to the upcoming hosts. With Puppet and Chef, you have to install an agent program that will act as a layer for interacting with the host. You need to install an agent in between, which takes time as well.

It is a very straightforward process. There is a package available on their site. After we download their software for the respective distro, we just write the installation command, and everything runs greatly. After installing the product, most people make use of Ansible roles. Ansible Galaxy is already filled with a lot of roles. A lot of developers have already contributed to a great setup with their proper codes. As a user, I have to just install a role or just download it from the site. It was not a lengthy or complex process. It was very easy.

For the initial setup, it takes about 10 to 15 minutes in going through sites and searching for a particular version. The installation will take about 5 minutes. After that, you have to configure Ansible properly, which might take a little bit of time, but it also depends on whether you know the IP address of the host. If you know the IP address and credentials, then you just have to enter it in the Ansible configuration file, and it is done. 

There is good integration between RHEL and Ansible. There are repositories configured for Ansible and you just enter the yum install ansible command, and it will do all the setup and it will also create a basic configuration file. The only remaining task would be to configure that inventory. You need to know the IP address of the host to which you are going to connect and the password. After you enter it into the inventory, it runs very quickly. There is no need to download it from any site. If you're using Ansible with Red Hat, then there is very little chance of any error while using Ansible.

Ansible's documentation is well-maintained and updated very frequently. You just need to go through the documentation. It is very easy to read. There is nothing much to worry about.

Ansible Tower has great integration capabilities with enterprises solutions such as OpenShift and many more. I've seen many people integrating OpenShift with Tower, but I have not done it.

Before going for automation, one must first know the manual approach to it. After you've applied a manual approach, you can easily understand what type of automation you can do for your environment and infrastructure and how to do the automation.

When it is utilized with RHEL, things are very easy to understand. If someone has knowledge of RHEL, then they also have knowledge of Ansible. There is no need to study more about this. While using Ubuntu or different distros, you have to know more about Ansible, your OS-based package managers, and your internal configuration.

I'm currently preparing for the Ansible examination. I connect with their products remotely. They have configured every repository that one needs in their licensed products. Subscription will definitely be needed if you want to use it in the industry. If you just want to know about it, a subscription is not required.

I would rate Ansible an eight out of 10.