What advice do you have for others considering Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?

I recommend using both Ansible and Terraform for automation, especially now that both are under IBM. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

There are a lot of people, especially in the higher education space, who have been there for a very long time. The motivation and ability to draft in something as simple as Ansible is just not there for them. It is an opportunity for people who embrace automation, Ansible, and things like that to talk to the more senior people or the people who do not understand the Ansible aspect of it. They can start that dialogue and convert what is in their head and their older methods to getting things done into Ansible. Once we start doing that, we are able to daisy chain some of those different processes and tasks, and we can find different areas to improve and standardize. That has been a key to our organization. There are some people who we just would not be able to force to do automation, but it is easy for somebody who knows automation and Ansible to talk to them and say, "I do not know exactly what you are doing, but if you tell me, I can convert it into Ansible code for you? In a perfect world, Ansible Automation Platform would help connect teams, such as developers, operations, or security, so that they can automate together, but we are not there yet. I would rate Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten. The small areas of improvement that I would like to see probably are not there for technical reasons. There are a few things that I would like to see, but everything else is there.

Ansible Automation Platform has not helped us connect teams, such as developers, operations, or security so that they can automate together. In our organization, getting security involved is like pulling teeth. They say, "You got to meet these standards. Go figure it out." They set the standards, and we have to implement them. I cannot get them involved in anything other than them telling us what we have to implement. There are not a lot of Windows users like us. We have made it work very well. We had to do extra to get there, but it was not that much. I would rate Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten. I do not give tens. If we push one button and it is set up and works with everything, I would give it a ten, so that is never going to happen.

I would rate Ansible Automation Platform a ten out of ten. It has helped us go from manual to automation. We are still far away, but it is getting us on the right path. It is getting us there. It is great.

I would rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten.

Users with the right environment, like Linux, should go for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. With the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, we don't have to do manual things, increasing our efficiency. The solution helps us complete our complex work very easily, increasing efficiency. Overall, I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform ten out of ten.

I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

If you know the basics of coding for you to write the playbook's code, and if you have a midrange environment with up to 1,000 servers, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a good option to automate daily tasks. I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Users have to lay out how they want to build the solution. They should first build smaller job templates and then add them together to build workflow job templates. Overall, I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a nine out of ten.

Actually, when you are building Ansible Tower, I think you need to go for the pricing. For other things, you don't need to do that, I guess. So it's a pretty good tool to automate your day-to-day or daily tasks or activities that can be done with Ansible. It has a lot of features, helping materials, and modules, which will be helpful in automating one's day-to-day jobs. It's pretty easy for us to upgrade and work with the nodes on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. If you go with any other tools, like Chef or Puppet, they are very hard to configure. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is agentless and pretty straightforward. It will reduce a lot of our headaches in general. I rate the overall solution a ten out of ten.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a declarative infrastructure management system that works fine if supported by the environments you use to set up. I rate the overall product an eight or nine out of ten.

I would highly recommend Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, especially to organizations that are moving toward a cloud or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Overall, I would rate this solution at seven on a scale from one to ten.

I rate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform a ten out of ten.

The solution is not the best fit at the enterprise level because there are issues with reporting and websites when handling 24,000 servers. In this scenario, I rate the solution a six out of ten. The solution is a good fit for smaller or medium-sized businesses with up to 10,000 servers. In this scenario, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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

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 solution is a wonderful tool and is simple to learn and use. There is much flexibility in the open-source environment when using the solution. I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We are a contractor of the client. We support the client, so whatever the client needs, we use and provide. Our client owns Red Hat, and therefore we use it. Our operating system is Red Hat. We chose it due to the fact that it is open source. In Red Hat, we can use VMware or physical servers or the cloud and find Red Hat to be easy to use, secure, and user-friendly. Also, if we use all RHEL products, they are all compatible with each other. If we use a third party, we might have issues. With RHEL products, it is already tested on the RHEL side, so we don't generally see issues. It's one of the best products to use. It is easy to understand and easy to manage. You can use it if you have a cloud, physical server, or VMware. It is very good and offers operational efficiency. I would rate the solution nine out of ten. We like it, and we feel good about its capabilities.

I would rate this solution as 10 out of 10.

I have a partnership with Red Hat. It's clear and simple, and there's plenty of help available. I would rate the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform an eight out of ten.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Test the environment because it is easy to use. Once you are proficient with Unix and Linux, it is extremely easy to use it: Setting up the inventory system, YAML files, and SSH keys. I have no complaints about Ansible. I just wish I had more time to really delve into it. I think we not using Ansible to its fullest potential, because of: * Training. * Time. * Not knowing all the options available. I haven't been exposed to Ansible Tower much. I have only tested it out three times. Right now, I am a little rusty on it, so it will take some getting used to again. It is more GUI-based, so it is pretty user-friendly. The biggest lesson learnt: There are multiple ways of doing the same thing. I would rate this solution as a nine (out of 10) because of the configuration management for all our servers in the environment. It can be used within the networking field for all devices, such as Cisco switches. The solution speaks to Windows hosts as well. It just takes time to use all the functionality and get it visible across the organization.

We mostly run everything CentOS, and do the Community edition.

In addition to the developers who use it most, we hand over job access to different teams. Security needs some data, we clear jobs for them, we hand it over to them. But most of it is with Operations and the Development team. I rate it a seven out of ten because there are a couple of things which I expect from Tower which are not there yet. As I mentioned already, things like services being populated from templates, job tags are not there on workflows right now, I have to go to another tool like Splunk or Sumo or some other logging tool to look at graphs. If those were possible in Tower it would be amazing. Anybody could run a job and go and look at a graph and see what happened, instead of having to log into another tool. There are things which I think can be added to Tower, but it's a good tool.

Puppet is the main configuration management we have right now. The goal is that Ansible will do all the administration and deployment, and do all things with a baseline, to meet our standards. Then Puppet is going to be taking care of a lot of the rest of the configuration for all the different projects.

I'll start on Cisco IOS stuff in Q1, 2019. I'm pretty excited to learn about the network engine today, here at AnsibleFest 2018, because I haven't looked at it at all yet.

Another thing that I've been doing is mentoring teams on how to use Ansible. Ironically, I've been mentoring the server teams, which is where I worked in the first part of my career. I was more on the server side: Windows, a little bit of Linux. But I find it's so easy to use that it's more about the concepts and the Ansible language. I saw a very interesting use case where Harvard University Online essentially does its entire deployment using Ansible end-to-end, with native infrastructure. That is geared to a lot of things we do within our managed services. I knew that was possible, but seeing it in real life, how they deployed and the number of different stacks that they've touched, was something. Their ability to demonstrate they've done that is pretty remarkable. Because some documentation needs to be improved - while getting started with it is getting better - it's hard to give it a perfect ten. It's definitely in the top products that I suggest to customers. I would rate it a nine out of ten. But you have to look at it as a framework. It's not going to come in and solve all of your problems, but you can build on it. You can develop your own module if it doesn't ship with the product. The core of Ansible is very solid.

I like what Red Hat did with Ansible. They are keeping the community focus as a whole and building around the grass roots movement that Ansible started. They are keeping that and putting a fresh face on it. Tower is user-friendly too.

The documentations are great. Everything is pretty well-documented.

It simplifies everything. You can see what is happening actively on your screen. Now, with Tower and AWX, you are able to see the output afterwards. You can set up cron through the web interface and see what happens.

I learned about the solution last year through AWX. Surprisingly enough, I found AWX first, then made my way to Tower from there. From a security standpoint, we are a security company so I will always back my product over what these other tools do. From their standpoint, we do practice adding certificates and keys into Tower credentials. We use and trust it. My preference would always be to get all of the secrets out of all the tools and manage them in a central location. They have some room for improvement, but they're doing a great job as is.

It's an effective solution for the problem space. In terms of learning about the solution and finding new ways to do things or solving problems, I think you are a quick Google search away.

Ansible is fast to deploy and develop in. I rate it a seven out of 10, for now. It doesn't work well with large-scale infra. Also, as I am a relative beginner (I have been working on Ansible for 6 months, mainly for automation) and the lack of documentation is an issue.