Stable and scalable automation platform that is highly compatible with other tools
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
It brings a lot of time-saving.
What is most valuable?
The API for exposing all our infrastructure services is the most valuable feature.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for three months.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used multiple tools in the past three years, but we did not use any other similar product to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was easy. I was not a part of the deployment process, but my team members told me about the deployment process.
What about the implementation team?
The in-house team asked the support team questions.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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
What other advice do I have?
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.
A good open-source software offering broad support and reliability to its users
What is our primary use case?
We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in our company to implement a software-defined infrastructure, which involves defining the desired configuration of machines in terms of their components, setup, security, user roles, software deployment, and certificate deployment. With this platform, we are able to set up new environments and manage the lifecycle of instances across various stages, such as development, production, and pre-production. We also use it for routing up and back of new software.
What is most valuable?
Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable.
What needs improvement?
I think some community projects support Ansible Playbooks, but they often break with version updates. It's a difficult problem to solve. DevOps should have a library with common components to make Ansible more productive when there are updates to Ansible and the operating system. What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix. It becomes a cost-benefit analysis of reusing old Ansible scripts versus rewriting them from scratch after updates. The problem is that it becomes quite fragile over time, and this fragility is a problem.
If the IDE and auto-completion of the solution are based on Checkpt, it is important to ensure that the AI coding tools support writing in a more declarative way. While I have not yet tried coding with this assistance, Microsoft and Keylabs both offer AI coding assistants. The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding. It is crucial to see how well they work with the new versions of Ansible.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for almost five years. My company is an end-user of the solution.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The product's stability is very good. I rate it an eight out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Ansible is a configuration tool that doesn't have to scale like other tools. So scalability does not apply to the solution. Also, it's not a tool used by thousands of users. I am unsure if it can be used to manage thousands of servers. Small teams, like the DevOps team, use the solution. We service large groups of servers with it using a very small team of about two or three and a maximum of four people.
How are customer service and support?
I have never contacted technical support. We use open-source support.
How was the initial setup?
The solution's initial setup process was simple. The solution gets used in various ways, and it's essentially a configuration tool you run from any node with access to other nodes. It has got server versions as well. So, you can use it either way.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We compared it to other configuration management tools before choosing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. We did not choose others since they were not as centralized. It doesn't need a server since you can run it from your clients, and it doesn't need a central deployment service or server.
What other advice do I have?
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.
We got easier operations using RH ansible
What do you like best about the product?
We have run 14 private cloud virtualized by Red hat openstack, following up on all this data centers was very difficult, we noticed the flavour of easy operation when we used the automation of Ansible.
What do you dislike about the product?
The integration is not that easy between the OpenStack Orchestration and Ansible and the application, but we reached out target at the end with the help of great support that Red Hat provide.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We don't care about the application sizing the platform is become scaling up and down the VNFs according to the usage, without our manual intervention the service expand when the traffic increase with a certain defined threshold, which is great.
Ansible for automation
What do you like best about the product?
Ansible is most trending and popular tool for automation now a days. It uses for vm or cloud or even for appliances as well. It's python based automation software which allow us to create n number of roles and task to manage infrastructure in one go.
What do you dislike about the product?
I personally didn't feel anything which is less useful or things I dislike.but ansible can work on developing better UI and managing task via it. Overall there is nothing on this product which I could say things of dislikes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It automated all jobs which we used to do manually. It also allow us to modify or create existing playbooks. It worked with cloud as well so it's good option for terrafom.
Amazing Configuration Application!!
What do you like best about the product?
The best thing i like about ansible is push mechanism. Whenever any update on new configuration is available to the server it directly pushes to the nodes connected to it. Unlike chef, nodes do not repeatedly check server for updates.
What do you dislike about the product?
Ansible works fine in Unix/Linux based systems. for windows, they should work on developing more functionalities.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
By using ansible, managing server nodes has become easy. Playbooks are written in YAML language which is in human readable format. Unlike chef, it does not have chef-client. Which makes it agentless and less performance overhead.
Ansible - Automation
What do you like best about the product?
- Server Automation
- Application Deployment
- Configuration Management
What do you dislike about the product?
- Server Creation requires additional software's
- Agent Inventory Management
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Automation multiple software deployment
- Managing Infrastructure with Ansible Automation
Stable Automation Configuration Tool
What do you like best about the product?
Andible is a great tool to manage, maintain,deploy configuration and create or delete servers.
You can also run tasks through all servers.
You can categorising your servers to webservers,db ,etc.
What do you dislike about the product?
The verbosing is not functioning properly.
No User interface and AWX is not the best easy thing to use.
Updates are required in the Shell commands.
Using Yaml is a little bit complex.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Managing more than 100 server without any tool it will be a nightmare.
Using ansible make things easier and fast to handle and deploy.
With ansible-playbook you can write your instructions and in just few seconds will be ran across your inventory.
Ansible the easiest way ahead
What do you like best about the product?
Its free, very simple to use, no coding skill required. One can do end to end automation and easy to add GUI using jenkins.
Being an agentless tool, it also reduces the concern to check agents status every now and then.
What do you dislike about the product?
Till now i am fully satisfied with the tool and do not find any factor to dislike it. It's really easy and fully secure.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We have automated the prechecks, postchecks, end to end patching of Linux servers, installation of various agents, user/group management and many more operation tasks
Recommendations to others considering the product:
You can use the tool for almost all operational and automation task. It requires no prior programming skill and is agentless. There are many useful adhoc commands which you will find easy to use as compared to the native for loop in bash script
Ansible Engine
What do you like best about the product?
- Very easy to implement and light weight.
- Cross platform usage.
- Excellent documentation available on web, version wise. Plus point for a new user.
- Easy to configure and setup. Also, the configuration covers extensive features.
- Availability of Python modules are very important and development friendly.
- It offers a new design to bring "enterprise-grade global support" to ansible automation projects.
- Provides Networking add-ons including full support for selected networking platforms.
- Best for Cloud related setup and development. Also allows you to do Multi-Cloud DevOps Operations.
- Good community response, if you have any query.
What do you dislike about the product?
- Windows can be a pain. Very less support for Windows. Linux machine is preferable.
- Not so good GUI. It can be better.
- Creating extensive logic in the playbooks are simpler in other scripting languages. Here it is a little tricky.
- MSSQl and Vault are some of the modules that should also be included.
- Only SSH connection by default.
- Should have a better error handling mechanism.
- Too many modules can create a confusion some times, but due to good documentation it can be solved easily.
- It is hard to pass run-time parameters in Ansible.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use Ansible everyday in our CI/CD pipeline and task automation on computing and configuring clusters.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Even though it looks complicated, but still it is user friendly and
Ansible: The masterpiece without hassle A graceful tool for configuration-management and deployment.
What do you like best about the product?
Time saving:- Administration tasks such as patching systems can be done quickly and remotely at ease with the help of packaging module, updating and rebooting a system, restarting virtual machines can be done conveniently and efficiently.
Easy configuration management language: - It uses YAML language to write playbooks which is very easy to understand that can be used from developer to n/w admin.
Agentless remote systems:- It requires no agents to install on remote system
Native protocols:- Depending upon device types It uses native protocol like SSH for Unix, WinRM for windows etc.
Cloud native infrastructure management:- It can be used in the process of container build, Cluster management, application life-cyles and many more.
It is open source, you can also write your own plugins, Ansible tower which is easy to use web-based ui.
What do you dislike about the product?
It is platform dependent therefore the code written in one OS will not work on another.
It is slow as compared to other tool like salt
Push model is slow.
Ansible doesn,t fail fast if there is any config error:- There is no feature to check the modules on pre-conditions. So in ansible with minimum syntax check it moves forward till it reaches the module with an error while altering the host config and leaving your host in partially config state.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is used for application deployment without going directly to the desk which saves our time.
It is easy to use as compared to power shell.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you need to setup configuration management tool and deployment tool urgently. Ansible is the best platform for setting up your IT environment. As it is very easy to pick up concepts and start working on and documentation is also readable. It is understandable right from network administrator to manager, developer .
