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Why choose Red Hat for automation?

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Automation isn’t just a tool—it’s a strategic imperative. And Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is built for strategic automation.

Think about it like this: yes, Ansible Automation Platform (and all its included tools) reduces the number of steps and training required to actually automate things by: 

  • Using YAML, a data-serialization language that uses English-language words to mirror how people actually communicate.
  • Connecting endpoints without agents, removing steps from communication processes and streamlining security needs.
  • Providing collections of certified content made up of bundled modules, plugins, roles, playbooks, and documentation.

But more than all that, Ansible Automation Platform connects cross-functional teams (from developers to operations or IT to security) so they can automate together—in concert.

The difference is in the platform

Any automation software can automate tasks. But when automation becomes a business imperative, siloed scripts maintained by few (sometimes known as islands of automation) don't scale. Ansible Automation Platform is a subscription product that helps teams create automation playbooks that operations teams can manage and scale strategically across an entire enterprise.

With every newly published playbook or certified content collection, the robust Ansible community invites new team members to get involved—automating the work they know best on a platform other teams are already using.

Architects. Developers. System administrators. By separating the control plane from the execution plane and moving to a container-based architecture, Ansible Automation Platform provides a consistent user experience across teams—no matter what or where they’re automating. An admin may use the platform to automate tasks inside a public cloud while a network engineer automates physical servers, switches, routers, and load balancers.

And that’s how automation scales: strategically.

Learn about the business benefits of automation

Ansible Automation Platform is the strategic automation solution. It’s no longer just an upstream command line Ansible package with support. And it’s not just a graphical user interface for Ansible. It’s a proven enterprise platform used by every Fortune 500 company in the airline, government, and military sectors to create, manage, and scale automation strategies.

Create

Developers can write consistent code in an execution environment—without constraints or operational overhead—using:

Check out this webinar on creating automation content

Manage

Operations teams can automate—as intended—from development through production. Private automation hub helps integrate execution environments into automation jobs. Automation controller helps define, delegate, and operate automation across the organization, while Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform and automation analytics provide the data needed to track and improve how the platform is used.

Scale

Encourage more people to use the automation tools you created by providing self-service portals, tapping into the application programming interface (API), perusing catalogs, or integrating with external systems. IT architects can design and expand automation tactics across environments and geographies using automation mesh—a secured, resilient overlay network of distributed worker nodes that localize execution environments. With predefined automation options, users can automate without having to understand the underlying details or complexities.

Watch this webinar on scaling your automation strategy

IDC report: Ansible Automation Platform delivers business value

According to IDC research, organizations who standardize operations with Ansible Automation Platform significantly improve IT operational efficiency, speed, and scalability—realizing benefits worth an annual average of US$14.81 million and earning a 668% three-year ROI.

Get the report

Similar to other Red Hat products, Ansible Automation Platform uses an open source development model of the Ansible project to create an experience tailored to enterprise automation. This open development model connects the engineers behind Ansible Automation Platform to more than a dozen open source Ansible projects in the community. As members work together to identify and elevate the best ideas, Red Hat supports them by contributing to the code and creating products from upstream projects.

Ansible Automation Platform simplifies packaging and distribution while providing tested and trusted interoperability between all the components. Combined with an 18-month support life cycle, Ansible Automation Platform takes the complexity, uncertainty, and guesswork out of using upstream open source tools.

Enhance automation security with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Ansible Content Collections. Video duration: 4:59.

Ansible Automation Platform does more than enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage automation at scale. It also allows teams to automate in a more secure environment, so they can worry less about maintaining their security posture and focus more on meeting the needs of the business.

Ansible Automation Platform differentiates itself by supporting an end-to-end, trusted automation supply chain built around Ansible Content Collections. Including both Red Hat Certified Content Collections and Ansible validated content, Ansible Content Collections are created and curated by Red Hat and our partners. Collections are available for download from Ansible automation hub, where you can view a collection’s Red Hat signature and provenance—meaning you never have to wonder about what a collection includes or where it came from.

Automation users also benefit from Red Hat’s robust development life cycles, which provide stability through patches, bug fixes, updates, upgrades, and security hardening from the Red Hat Product Security team.

Red Hat offers interactive labs in a preconfigured Ansible Automation Platform environment. You 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.

Watch Ansible Automation Platform in action. See how you can use it to share knowledge, expand teams, fill skill gaps, and free up automation experts to focus on higher-level tasks. Video duration: 10:29

Keep reading

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Learning Ansible basics

Ansible automates IT processes like provisioning and configuration management. Learn the basics of Ansible with this introduction to key concepts.

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What's an Ansible Playbook?

An Ansible Playbook is a blueprint of automation tasks, which are IT actions executed with limited manual effort across an inventory of IT solutions.

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Why choose Red Hat for automation?

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes all the tools needed to share automation across teams and implement enterprise-wide automation.

More about automation

Products

A unified solution that combines the security, features, integrations, and flexibility needed to scale automation across domains, orchestrate essential workflows, and optimize IT operations for AI adoption. 

Engagements with our strategic advisers who take a big-picture view of your organization, analyze your challenges, and help you overcome them with comprehensive, cost-effective solutions.

Resources

E-BOOK

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide

Customer Success Stories

See how our customers have used Ansible Automation Platform to accelerate IT operations

Podcast

Code Comments Season 2: Hear how organizations have adapted to do more with IT automation 

Training

Learning hub

Explore learning materials and tools designed to help you use Ansible Automation Platform, organized by the tasks you need to accomplish. 

Interactive Labs

These interactive scenarios let you start learning how to use Ansible Automation Platform for a variety of use cases—in your own browser. 

Technical Overview

This series of on-demand videos introduces you to using Ansible Automation Platform for a variety of use cases across IT environments.

Automating RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX

This course will teach you how to automate Linux® system administration tasks with the latest version of Ansible Automation Platform.