Today’s IT teams face many challenges, especially as the IT infrastructure continues to become more complicated. Between the high standards for application performance and staying on top of rapidly evolving security threats, IT teams wear many hats, which are only growing more numerous and heavier as time goes on.
As a result, IT must prioritize solutions that offer agility without creating undue burdens through a need for manual administration.
In the article below, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of Red Hat Ansible Automation, a platform that has recently been growing in popularity amongst IT groups prioritizing productivity and automation.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Overview
As a comprehensive solution, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes several different products, all of which support improved IT productivity. These include Content Collections, the Automation Hub, the Automation Services Catalog, and more.
The cornerstone is Red Hat Ansible Tower, which is based on technology available in the AWX open-source community and offers enterprise-scale operations, analytics, and security, while also offering integrations with third-party systems. It allows IT teams to centralize IT infrastructure through a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications, and graphical inventory management.
The dashboard provides a “heads-up, NOC-style display” and offers a simple and clean user interface (UI) for administrators, reducing visual clutter and making actions quick and efficient. As the infrastructure is automated, administrators can see real-time job status updates, with plays and tasks broken down by each machine. The status of other types of jobs, like cloud inventory refreshes, can be found in additional views within the Ansible Tower UI.
With Ansible Tower Workflows, IT teams can easily model complicated processes. Administrators can chain any number of playbooks, updates, or other workflows, even those that use different inventories, have different users, or utilize different credentials.
Ansible Tower also security logs all automation activity, including relevant information such as which user ran it and how it was customized. This information is securely stored and is viewable at a later date, or exported for company records. Ansible Tower also offers inventory synchronization with comprehensive asset tracking and CMDB source, helping ensure automated actions are aligned with the most up-to-date system state and configuration data.
Benefits and ROI of Red Hat Ansible for IT Automation
Now that we’ve shared some of the most exciting features of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, let’s discuss the value that enterprises can gain from the solution.
In a study conducted by IDC, which featured interviews from Red Hat Ansible Tower customers, study participants cited benefits including, “the ability to meet DevOps requirements for private cloud and the ability to customize thereby making it easier for DevOps resources to be deployed rapidly and easily. They also cited business benefits such as total cost of ownership, the ability to offer standardized automation, and the fact that their developers were already familiar with and comfortable working on open-source technology.”
Other benefits of the solution, as observed by the participants, included:
- More agile IT operations.
- Infrastructure configuration standardization.
- Multiple teams brought together.
- Integration with an agile DevOps model.
In their research, IDC found that enterprises utilizing Red Hat Ansible Automation were deploying applications faster and reducing the time to market, managing IT systems more efficiently, building a strong foundation for DevOps efforts, and increasing the number of applications and features.
When quantified, these and other benefits provided by the solution were found by IDC to offer significant financial gains. When averaged, Red Hat Ansible Automation customers saw a 68% improvement in productivity for IT infrastructure management, which translated to a $460,000 staff time value.
In terms of development, Red Hat Ansible Automation customers saw a 75% increase in the number of new applications. Customers also saw a 41% improvement in the time spent by staff managing applications. IT security productivity also saw improvements, with enterprises reporting a 25% improvement in staff time.
The benefits of Red Hat Ansible Automation are clear and enterprises around the globe are taking advantage of the cost savings and productivity gains that can be found through its automation strategies.
Ready to get started with Red Hat Ansible for IT Automation?
Red Hat is a leading provider of enterprise open-source solutions for digital transformation, automation, cloud-native development, and more. Through an extensive portfolio of solutions, Red Hat is helping enterprises standardize their IT infrastructure and manage complex IT environments. If you’re ready to explore Ansible for your business, contact WEI today. Our experience can help answer your questions and we can help you find opportunities to get started with Red Hat Ansible Automation.
