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Last November, Red Hat released Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, a new offering that combines Ansible solutions with new capabilities. As part of this, Ansible customers could now take advantage of new hosted services, such as Automation Analytics and Automation Hub, while also unifying Ansible Tower and Ansible Engine under one overarching platform.
This spring, we announced a number of enhancements to Automation Analytics, and launched Automation Services Catalog and Ansible Certified Content Collections. Ansible Content Collections allow developers to readily access Red Hat supported and certified content from a number of Red Hat technology partners. These changes are not only meant to put more tools to drive automation optimization into customers’ hands, but to also simplify and unify the customer experience.
Ansible is known as a means to connect various islands of automation. It enables new efficiencies by reducing time spent on manual processes, so that IT teams have more time to focus on new and innovative projects. Freeing up time, in addition to connecting teams through automation, allows for a more unified culture across your IT organization. Ansible speaks to a number of different personas to connect across the organization through automation. You now have the ability to automate across all IT infrastructure and many different IT vendor solutions using Ansible certified integrations backed by Red Hat.
Ansible Automation Platform also enables customers to bridge traditional and cloud-native infrastructure effectively. Using Ansible with Kubernetes, developers can coordinate and manage networking, cloud services and bare metal servers along with container-based applications and services. With these unique benefits, users can implement GitOps workflows that extend beyond conventional Kubernetes confines to existing IT Infrastructure, providing customers the flexibility and freedom to tailor workflows accordingly. With Ansible, you can deploy, manage and automate multiple environments through one control plane using existing skills and the same tried and trusted Ansible tooling.
Going back to the aforementioned Ansible Content Collections, let’s dive into how these can really simplify what can be very time consuming and tedious processes. First, let’s understand the significance of Ansible Content Collections. The Ansible project recently completed an effort to decouple the Ansible executable from most of the content, and all the migrated content now resides in new upstream repositories on GitHub. This change initiated a ripple effect on backend development, testing, publishing and maintenance on Ansible content. Now, high quality features can be delivered more quickly and asynchronously from Ansible releases.
These Collections are certified by Red Hat and fully supported. This gives those who are accessing Ansible Content Collections through Automation Hub - a private content repository for publishing and discovering Ansible automation - the freedom to very quickly spin up automation in their IT stack using Ansible automation with vendors like Cisco ASA and IOS, IBM QRadar, Juniper JunOS and others. There are also Certified Collections for Red Hat products like Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Insights. And this is just the beginning; there are a number of new Collections scheduled to be announced at AnsibleFest in October, which will further help you enable your IT teams to simplify how they integrate across your IT infrastructure.
Simplifying workloads is perhaps more important now than ever before as more work needs to be done remotely and sometimes around the clock. Ansible Automation Platform has the means to both unify and standardize automation across many different systems and vendors, with the added piece of mind that this platform is fully supported by Red Hat. We will also be talking about all of these topics and hosting a number of demos and panels in October at AnsibleFest. In the meantime, try a free trial of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to see if it’s the right fit for your business automation needs.
About the author
Jamie Beck is a Senior Principal Product Marketing Manager with the Ansible Automation Business Unit at Red Hat. Jamie has an extensive background in networking and security having spent a number of years at Cisco and Tenable, and has been at Red Hat since 2017.
