Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

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 just started using Community with Ansible. We are trying to install agents to either a cloud or a local virtual machine. We are still in the starting phase as it has only been implemented for two months.

My team thinks it is easy to work with, especially when working with the nodes. When the nodes increase, from say five to 15, I don't have to do anything extra.

1. There are so many models that I don't have to create one. I don't have to worry about anything. In these two months, everything was easily available.
2. Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it. 

One problem that I'm facing right now is the mismatch between the new version of Python and Ansible. Sometimes it's Python 2, and sometimes it's Python 3. When things get a bit dicey, I wish that Ansible would solve this issue by itself. I don't want to have to specify if it is Python 3 or version 2.

I haven't had any issues, but I have only been working with it for two months.

It is scalable enough for our needs. We are not working with hundreds of nodes, just ten to 15.

The community is enough for me.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

I researched with other tools, but I still chose Ansible. One reason, it was agentless. With other tools, I had to install agents. Ansible has a big plus factor being agentless.

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. 

The primary use case is for configuration management. We use it for patching and updating. We also use it to send out new configs to all our servers.

It saves time; it cut our configuration time. 

It is very easy to use, and there is less room for error. For exampe, if we had 10 servers, and we need to update a file on each server. So, you would have to go into every server and update the file manually, then sign out. You can mess up on the sixth one and have configuration issues. It is easier to use one server to create a playbook, then you just hit "push" and the playbook is distributed to all the servers.

Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server.

It is very easy to grasp. Multiple users on my team can utilize it without me giving them a thorough tutorial. This has been helpful.

For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on.

It needs better documentation when setting it up. It is not very clearly stated how exactly to set up Ansible Tower, though it is pretty self-explanatory.

It is definitely a workhorse. It does our back-end deployment, so we utilize it very heavily. We're committing too much to it, so we have it highly available. We built some redundancies around it just in case it ever goes down, because it's a big part of our work.

We are about 50 servers. It is not very big, but we are continuing to grow.

If we want to utilize technical support, we would need to use a more premium solution since Ansible Tower is free.

The integration and configuration in our AWS environment was super easy to set up. It does all our tasks. Having it integrate with our front-end and back-end deployment has all been seamless. There is no custom configurations.

Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product.

We considered Chef and Puppet, which are very similar to Ansible. However, they have a more Ruby-based programming language. Therefore, it takes more time to learn and incorporate into a company. Ansible is easier for everyone to understand what is going on without actually knowing the programming language.

We chose Ansible for simplicity. Ansible is easy to set up, then get up and running in about a day or so. With Chef, I would have had to sit there and learn it, so the time constraints didn't really work out.

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.

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 primarily use the solution for automation purposes. We also use it for CI/CD plus DevOps. So these are the three main uses. We can use it for operational automation plus DevOps. We handle applications, pipelines, deployments, et cetera.

With this solution, we're able to cover our client's needs. 

The automation is very good. The operational automation and DevOps are the most valuable features for us. 

It's easy to set up.

The solution can scale.

It's very stable. 

Now, there is a GitHub solution that came on the market. GitHub's integration with Ansible is adding value for the customer as GitHub has the capability to push/pull architecture plus it can bring in collaboration and versioning. As long as they continue to develop this integration, it will continue to be useful. What is next is to look into the infrastructure.

The improvement is already there in GitHub's capability. GitHub is already there, however, they can bring something like that into the solution as well too. They can bring AOPs capability. They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way. 

The solution costs a lot. It's not cheap.

I've been using the solution for the last four years. 

The solution is extremely stable. that's why so many organizations end up using it. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution can scale well. It works for small or large enterprises. There is no limitation. 

Technical support has been good. We are very satisfied with the level of service we get. They are continuously improving their services as well. As long as they continue to improve we will remain happy.

Positive

The solution is very straightforward. It's easy to set up. It's not difficult at all. 

How many engineers you need to handle the implementation depends on the project and use case. It depends, for example, on how many automations will be created, et cetera. The time it takes to deploy also varies. Different use cases have different deployment times. 

Our company provides the implementation for our clients. We are able to handle the setup ourselves. 

We've seen an ROI. It is reducing the resources needed by the customers.

It's an expensive product. It's costly. 

We're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license. There are some limitations as well, however, specifically in AOPs.

We're partners. 

Which version we use depends on the customer If they have a license the latest is fine. We can also work with an older version. Whatever's possible we can do. We have the list of the scripts available, which can help us do the automation for the customer.

It's on the cloud we utilize Azure and AWS. It can also be used on-premises.

It's an effective tool. We weren't sure about it at first, however, it helps reduce resources and has been helpful to customers. 

I'd rate it an eight 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.