Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews

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 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 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. 

It's a catch all. We now have a central way of pushing out updates. As long as we have every name of all the hosts on the network that we want to patch on Linux primarily, we have it covered, from one person logging on and issuing the commands, then looking for the feedback from the servers.

I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver.

I have seen indications that the documentation needs improvement. They are providing a "How to Improve Your Documentation" presentation at this conference.

It is stable and reliable. I don't see any problems with it.

We patch every week and have seven different environments, so now we are dealing with about 300 servers. However, we could increase that to 20,000 servers, as long as we have them in our catalog. We could push that out and be fine.

We haven't had to use tech support, but they are there. If we need to, I am sure we could easily reach out to them. We have an account.

We chose this solution simply because we use Red Hat. We trust Red Hat, and whatever Red Hat puts out, it is pretty solid.

The setup was done by another team of ours that we worked closely with. They walked us through setting up our own, and it's pretty straightforward. Once you install it, stand it up, and get all the configuration files in place, it seems pretty straightforward. 

I was surprised that it was so straightforward.

Our use case for it is as an automation tool. For the Linux side, we have very few automation tools. We do have Puppet Enterprise as a matter of fact, and we're looking at tools for automating our day-to-day operations, server builds, configuration management, etc.

We've got a demo version of Tower. We've been playing with it, using it for patching. One of our first goals is to automate patching.

The improvement is going to come in that we are going to be able to maintain configuration management, through the use of both Puppet and Ansible. Currently, in a manual process, hands-on - that is what kills us. When we have a system administrator trying to do his job, that kills us every time. We have 2,500 servers and if a project comes to him, we have 15-minute time-outs. I don't like that. He'll go in there and he'll change it. And we can't control that and we don't know when it gets changed.

The hope is that we automate and then it's there, we know it's there. And then we'll use Puppet to come in at the back, and just maintain it. That is our plan.

If somebody tries to change something through Puppet, we're going to get reports. Ansible is going to be used on the front end, and if somebody comes up and says, "We need this patch pushed out. It's an urgent patch. It's high criticality. We need to do it now," we'll do it through Ansible. We'll write a Playbook or a module and just, boom, get it done.

The most valuable feature is the Playbooks and pushing them out.

We'll probably use it in conjunction with Puppet, because Puppet is more a solution where every 30 minutes it's going to check, whereas as Ansible doesn't do that. You have to push, from my understanding. That's what I thought. I could be wrong.

It has been stable so far.

It's scalable. We're looking at an enterprise configuration, when we get it done. It's a matter of getting it licensed.

So far, in our interactions with technical support, they've been knowledgeable. We're very happy.

The setup looks pretty straightforward. From what I've seen, although it was done by another person, it seemed to be pretty simple. I think it was an RPM.

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.

We use it for the bot. It helps to keep tracking all the automation processes that are ongoing in your ecosystem

It helps with patching and keeping everything compliant.

Automation tracking is the most valuable feature. 

The SSM connection access needs improvement because right now, they do everything through SSH.

I have been Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for a few years. 

The solution is very stable. 

If there's some cloud add ons, we would increase the usage. Only admins use the solution. 

We just create a server, and then we use that server to on-premesis.

Ansible has good performance. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The beauty of Ansible is the easy ramp-up to get started.  You really only need Python and SSH access. Configuration is generally done in YAML, which is easy to understand, and there is a progression from ad hoc tasks, to playbooks, then to roles, which means you can start with one server and continue building up to datacenters worth of servers with the same methodology. Also, shared by most configuration management tools, the idea of creating a desired state scales better than trying to specify procedural steps to set up new hosts. There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master).

There is some overhead in setting up the initial playbooks, but it now takes less time to set up 10 servers than it did to configure one in the past. Also, the setup is consistent because there is not the concern that someone forgot to copy/paste a config line or run another command. Whatever is in the playbook gets done.

Because Ansible is establishing SSH sessions to perform tasks, there is a limit on scalability. Speed and the sheer number of open connections start to become issues past a couple hundred servers. There are some workarounds, but that is a key area for improvement. Ansible could also improve support for private package repos, to ensure that new batches of servers are getting the same package versions as earlier batches.

I have been using Ansible for about two years.

SSH is pretty good, but it was not designed for the access pattern of hundreds of connections out of configuration targets. Other tools solve this with a listening agent process, so the initial connection to configure is much faster.

I have not used customer service. Ansible is well established, so there is plenty of documentation, examples, and third-party resources.

Manual configuration and "Golden" templates for virtual machines were used.  The former is tricky to maintain consistency with. The latter seemed to require constant updating and it did not help maintain the configuration of already installed servers.

Initial setup boils down to installing Ansible and ensuring you have SSH access to a target that is running Python. Standard packaging is available on major Linux distros to install some level of Ansible. I recommend following instructions on Ansible's site to get the latest stable release as they have been improving rapidly.

Not applicable.

Although Red Hat has an enterprise add-on to manage Ansible through a web application and offers commercial support, I have not used it. Like many Red Hat products, they have a no-cost version of the web application (AWX, formerly Ansible Tower), but you are on your own to install and it is a little more complicated than just installing Ansible. AWX will probably be required in most shops for the RBAC functionality. With AWX, non-admins can be limited to perform some tasks, but not be allowed free reign with Ansible.

Salt (or SaltStack) is a similar tool, but does have an agent. There are other tools like Chef or Puppet that use languages other than Python. Ansible was chosen based on these characteristics and the others were not evaluated after this initial choice.