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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an end-to-end IT automation platform that can be used to configure systems, deploy software, orchestrate advanced workflows and more. It includes tools and resources to automate IT processes across domains, including infrastructure, DevOps, cloud, security and networks, from data centers to edge locations.
What is IT automation?
Automation is the use of software to perform tasks that help reduce cost, complexity, and chance of human error in previously manual processes. It is prevalent in IT systems and business decision software and can also be found in other industries such as manufacturing, retail, transportation and healthcare.
IT automation, sometimes referred to as infrastructure automation, uses repeatable instructions to reduce or streamline human interaction with IT systems. This could involve a single task, groups of tasks, or even a complex orchestration of tasks. Its key purpose is to help staff shift their efforts from tedious day-to-day matters to more strategic initiatives and innovations so they are able to focus on more interesting and productive work.
Why use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
With a Red Hat subscription, you get:
- Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated content from our robust partner ecosystem
- An event-driven solution that minimizes manual tasks
- A generative AI service to help you convert subject matter expertise into reliable Ansible code
- Enhanced security, reporting and analytics
- Expert knowledge gained through our experience working with thousands of customers
- Life cycle technical support to help you scale automation across your organization
Automation has become a key business imperative, and siloed scripts and tools maintained by a handful of people just can't scale. Ansible Automation Platform helps architects, developers and systems administrators create Ansible Playbooks that operations teams can then manage and scale strategically across an entire enterprise.
Free Ansible tutorial
If you'd like to learn more, Red Hat Training and Certification offers a free introduction to Ansible Automation Platform: (DO007) Ansible Basics: Automation Technical Overview.
This course consists of a series of 15 short videos introducing the platform and a number of key concepts, including:
- Ansible basics
- Ansible Playbooks
- Ansible variables
- Ansible constructs
- Templating
- Roles
- Automation controller
- Building automation
- Self-service IT
- Role-based access control
- Workflows
…and more. You'll get almost 3 hours of free Ansible training that will help you get started.
6 automation use cases
Not sure how you might use automation in your enterprise? IT automation has long been associated with configuration management, but with Ansible Automation Platform you can do so much more. Here are 6 common use cases for IT automation.
1. Infrastructure automation
Most IT organizations face growing infrastructure size and complexity. Teams are managing a mix of operating systems, databases, storage, IT service management (ITSM) platforms and more. With limited time and staff, IT teams often struggle to keep pace with this growth, resulting in delayed updates, patching and resource delivery.
Infrastructure automation involves applying automation to common management tasks—like provisioning, configuring, deploying and decommissioning—to simplify operations at scale, helping you to regain visibility into and control over your infrastructure.
2. Network automation
Even as underlying technologies have evolved, network management has remained largely the same. Networks are typically built, operated and maintained by hand. Traditional, manual approaches to network configuration and updates are too slow and error-prone to effectively support the needs of rapidly shifting workload requirements.
Network automation helps operations teams to become more agile and flexible so they can better support modern business demands.
3. Security automation
As both infrastructure and networks grow in size and complexity, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually manage security and compliance. Manual operations can result in slower detection and remediation of issues, errors in resource configuration and inconsistent policy application, potentially leaving your systems vulnerable to compliance issues and attacks.
Security automation can help you streamline daily operations and integrate security into processes, applications and infrastructure.
4. DevOps automation
DevOps brings development and operations teams together to move ideas and projects from development to production more efficiently and in less time. Traditional, manual management strategies cannot keep up with the increased demands of modern software development practices.
DevOps automation helps you accelerate your processes, continuously scale environments, and build continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows to support rapid, agile application and service development and delivery.
5. Cloud automation
Hybrid and multicloud environments add additional layers of complexity to infrastructure, network, application and user administration. IT teams need to manage both on-site and cloud-based environments, often using specialized management tools for each. This makes it nearly impossible to effectively maintain, track, scale and safely manage resources and applications by hand.
Cloud automation can unite hybrid and multicloud management under a single set of processes and policies to improve consistency, scalability and speed.
6. Edge automation
Organizations are doing more at the edge of the network, closer to where data is generated, services are used and end users interact with systems and devices.
Edge automation helps organizations respond to business needs by automating processes to discover, decide and take action. Ansible Automation Platform uses containerization to distribute and run automation across environments. This design makes running automation in environments with limited resources possible—letting you automate better at the edge.
Want some hands-on experience?
In addition to the free Ansible tutorial, we offer interactive labs in a preconfigured Ansible Automation Platform environment. You and your teams 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.
Learn more
About the author
Deb Richardson is the Senior Managing Editor for the Red Hat Blog.
