Overview
Automation isn’t just a tool—it’s a strategic imperative. And Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is built for strategic automation.
Think about it like this: yes, Ansible Automation Platform (and all its included tools) reduces the number of steps and training required to actually automate things by:
- Using YAML, a data-serialization language that uses English-language words to mirror how people actually communicate.
- Connecting endpoints without agents, removing steps from communication processes and streamlining security needs.
- Providing collections of certified content made up of bundled modules, plugins, roles, playbooks, and documentation.
But more than all that, Ansible Automation Platform connects cross-functional teams (from developers to operations or IT to security) so they can automate together—in concert.
The Red Hat difference
The difference is in the platform.
Any automation software can automate tasks. But when automation becomes a business imperative, siloed scripts maintained by few (sometimes known as islands of automation) don't scale. Ansible Automation Platform is a subscription product that helps teams create automation playbooks that operations teams can manage and scale strategically across an entire enterprise.
With every newly published playbook or certified content collection, the robust Ansible community invites new team members to get involved—automating the work they know best on a platform other teams are already using.
Architects. Developers. System administrators. By separating the control plane from the execution plane and moving to a container-based architecture, Ansible Automation Platform provides a consistent user experience across teams—no matter what or where they’re automating. An admin may use the platform to automate tasks inside a public cloud while a network engineer automates physical servers, switches, routers, and load balancers.
And that’s how automation scales: strategically.
The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q4 2024
End-to-end automation
Ansible Automation Platform is the strategic automation solution. It’s no longer just an upstream command line Ansible package with support. And it’s not just a graphical user interface for Ansible. It’s a proven enterprise platform used by every Fortune 500 company in the airline, U.S. government, and telecommunications sectors to create, manage, and scale automation strategies.
Create
Developers can write consistent code in an execution environment—without constraints or operational overhead—using:
- Thousands of published modules
- An event-driven solution to automate IT actions with user-defined, rule-based constructs
- More than 130 Certified Content Collections across more than 55 technology partners
- An expanding suite of development tools for developers.
- YAML-based Ansible Core to write their own automation code.
Manage
Operations teams can automate—as intended—from development through production. Private automation hub helps integrate execution environments into automation jobs. Automation controller helps define, delegate, and operate automation across the organization, while Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform and automation analytics provide the data needed to track and improve how the platform is used.
Scale
Encourage more people to use the automation tools you created by providing self-service portals, tapping into the application programming interface (API), perusing catalogs, or integrating with external systems. IT architects can design and expand automation tactics across environments and geographies using automation mesh—a secured, resilient overlay network of distributed worker nodes that localize execution environments. With predefined automation options, users can automate without having to understand the underlying details or complexities.
Open source automation
Similar to other Red Hat products, Ansible Automation Platform uses an open source development model of the Ansible project to create an experience tailored to enterprise automation. This open development model connects the engineers behind Ansible Automation Platform to more than a dozen open source Ansible projects in the community. As members work together to identify and elevate the best ideas, Red Hat supports them by contributing to the code and creating products from upstream projects.
Ansible Automation Platform simplifies packaging and distribution while providing tested and trusted interoperability between all the components. Combined with an 18-month support life cycle, Ansible Automation Platform takes the complexity, uncertainty, and guesswork out of using upstream open source tools.
Security-hardened automation
Ansible Automation Platform does more than enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage automation at scale. It also allows teams to automate in a more secure environment, so they can worry less about maintaining their security posture and focus more on meeting the needs of the business.
Ansible Automation Platform differentiates itself by supporting an end-to-end, trusted automation supply chain built around Ansible Content Collections. Including both Red Hat Certified Content Collections and Ansible validated content, Ansible Content Collections are created and curated by Red Hat and our partners. Collections are available for download from Ansible automation hub, where you can view a collection’s Red Hat signature and provenance—meaning you never have to wonder about what a collection includes or where it came from.
Automation users also benefit from Red Hat’s robust development life cycles, which provide stability through patches, bug fixes, updates, upgrades, and security hardening from the Red Hat Product Security team.
Want some hands-on experience?
Red Hat offers interactive labs in a preconfigured Ansible Automation Platform environment. You can use these labs to experiment, practice, and learn how to create, manage, and scale network and IT practices efficiently—from rapid development and deployment, to simplified operations and analytics, to consistent end-to-end user experiences.
The official Red Hat blog
Get the latest information about our ecosystem of customers, partners, and communities.
