Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Main article: IT Service Management (ITSM)

2021

Availability on Microsoft Azure platform

Red Hat, an open source solution provider, announced on December 13, 2021 the launch of the Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform service on the Microsoft Azure platform. The service is based on the Red Hat platform for automating the hybrid cloud, which has recently been significantly upgraded. The collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft allows you to offer the customer a solution for automated delivery of any applications to any site without unnecessary costs and difficulties.

The power of cloud computing, combined with the convenience of managed services, enables IT organizations to automate and scale their cloud quickly. Customers of Red Hat and Microsoft get an enterprise-class system at their disposal, without spending effort and money on its deployment and configuration. This allows you to immediately begin working on such complex tasks as automatic OS configuration, application initialization, network automation, implementation of the "infrastructure as code" model and security orchestration.

According to an IDC report, "Almost all organizations (97%) see serious obstacles to efficient automation across the enterprise. In the interval until 2023, many automation programs will be postponed or completely failed due to insufficient investment in the creation of IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the necessary tools and skills. The ultimate goal of such programs is to achieve holistic, coherent and cooperative automation at the enterprise scale. "

According to representatives of Red Hat, Anonymous Automation Platform on the Azure platform helps IT organizations cope with these complex and large-scale tasks, minimizing the factor of human errors. Integration with Azure services, including computing and networking services, as well as storage services, further improves the ROI of automation investments, enabling IT operations to scale efficiently.

The Azure-based Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform enables enterprise IT teams to scale, speed, and achieve the next level of standardization by automating the hybrid cloud. IT professionals get rid of the need to perform operational tasks and maintain IT infrastructure, and can focus entirely on implementing automation strategies to increase the efficiency, flexibility, and scalability of their enterprise.

Available in the latest version of Anonymous Automation Platform, autonomous automation capabilities enable large-scale deployment of systems in hybrid clouds and border sites, as well as closer and deeper automation as part of the application development lifecycle. The flexible foundation of the Red Hat automation platform, its tools, services offer a wide range of options for customised configuration and management.

The pre-release version of Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform on Azure is privately available after registration.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2

On September 29, 2021, Red Hat, an open source solution provider, announced the release of Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform 2, a hybrid cloud IT automation standard. The platform has undergone major redesign in view of the evolution of hybrid cloud computing and offers the concept of portable automation environments, as well as allows you to use automation in the earlier stages of application development.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2

According to the company, in a study commissioned by Red Hat, 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, notes that in its recent survey, respondents identified the following key tasks of the DevOps in terms of changing the corporate culture: overcoming resistance to change (35%), developing communications between teams that are not used to working together (34%) and removing isolation (33%). As the priority of in-house collaboration grows, so does the need for developers and IT professionals to standardize automation methods and expand use cases.

Hybrid and multi-cloud computing are becoming an important component of information systems. In this environment, IT organizations need automation platforms that can connect traditional IT systems with modern services that extend from enterprise data centers to the farthest borders of the network. Anonymous Automation Platform 2 has been redesigned to meet the realities of hybrid cloud computing and optimizes end-to-end automation across multiple environments and systems in a single, standardized manner. The automation controller (formerly Anonymous Tower) allows users to scale automation on demand, using a system approach to standardize automation methods and minimize abnormal situations when solving automation problems.

Another important update to the Anonymous Automation Platform in terms of comprehensive automation in an open hybrid cloud was the automation mesh network. This network links individual automation components together and checks the status of automation environments across all areas of the IT landscape. By providing connectivity in a variety of computing environments and networks, an automated network optimizes flexibility and fault tolerance without compromising security, enhancing the application and scalability of automation in the enterprise.

Since automation now covers the hybrid cloud, its tools are no longer the exclusive patrimony of IT operators. Along with them, developers must now be involved in automation, but this requires automation technology that is easy to transfer, has flexibility and is properly scaled, covering all components of the IT environment. Anonymous Automation Platform 2 addresses this challenge by expanding the automation community through cloud-based architecture, collaboration, and development tools to create, test, distribute, and manage automation content.

Anonymous Automation Platform 2 introduces the concept of automation execution environments, which replaced the Anonymous Engine and represent autonomous automation spaces that can be replicated and reused. These environments help IT professionals scale and accelerate the delivery of automation tools to different environments, and reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining a single standardized automation platform for all components of an open hybrid cloud.

Besides, the navigator of content of automation (automation content navigator) which appeared in Ansible Automation Platform 2 allows to check quicker operability of avtomatizatsionny content even in the largest environments. This helps everyone involved in automation, from programmers to system administrators, maintain operational consistency on all types of systems, from development workstations to test servers and production sites.

Optimizing interaction between IT professionals eliminates the isolation of traditional servers, virtual machines, and Red Hat OpenShift cloud clusters at the development and operational process levels. The Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform Kubernetes operator directly integrates Anonymous Automation Platform with Red Hat OpenShift, providing smoother cloud automation cluster deployments, easier data management and migration, and platform upgrades to optimize performance, making automation an organic part of the cloud.

In addition to the already known components of Automation Analytics, the Red Hat Insights service also offers a number of updated tools and functions:

• Advisor - Analyze automation controllers against criteria such as system availability, performance, stability and security using a set of recommendations that reflect Red Hat's extensive experience in this area.
• Drift is a benchmark system on the automation controller to ensure consistency of configurations and more accurate detection of problems through retrospective analysis of system data.
• Policies - Enable an organization to create its own policies to identify and address issues specific to its IT environment.

Early access to Anonymous Automation Platform 2 is open to all current and potential customers. The publicly available version of Anonymous Automation Platform 2.1 is scheduled for release in November 2021.

Despite the removal of many barriers between teams, especially between application developers and IT operators, the problem of closure persists. Automation helps bring different IT teams together by systematizing collaboration and communication to overcome this closeness. The formation of communities of practice - groups of employees united by common technical or business interests - encourages the exchange of proven automation content. narrated by Jay Lyman, senior research analyst at 451 Research

2020: Integration with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

On October 20, 2020 it became known that the Red Hat company, the solution provider with the open code, announced integratsiyured Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. This integration will help enterprise customers upgrade their applications to any IT reality, ensuring that application development and operation processes are unified across physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud clusters.

Application upgrades are one of the top IT priorities. According to estimates, Gartner"by 2022, only 40% of the management software products containers that are available will remain/remain competitive in the market.

IT professionals are often forced to maintain separate stacks of technology and workflow spaces - each with its own tools and strategies - creating unnecessary complexity and friction.

The integration of Anonymous Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management aims to eliminate these pain points in enterprise IT systems by reducing the number of tools used and the number of "switches" between traditional and cloud environments.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) provides cloud-level management and monitoring. When you want to go down to application or traditional IT systems, ACM acts as a management plane in the Red Hat OpenShift cluster and activates the corresponding functions of the Anonymous Automation Platform, for example, deployment system updates, load balancers, server resources, etc. As a result, the customer gets a single set of workflows to manage the complex hybrid cloud, and should not choose between what they need here and now and what they need in the future.

As part of the integration of the above two technologies, Red Hat relies on the capabilities of Kubernetes operators for advanced automation in the hybrid cloud. Operators facilitate the full-scale launch of applications on OpenShift clusters, wherever they are, and using the Resource Operator for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you can call the Anonymous Automation Platform to perform tasks outside the Kubernetes cluster.

Joe Fitzgerald, Vice President, Red Hat and Head of Management

With Red Hat OpenShift and Anonymous Automation Platform integrators, enterprises can use Anonymous for infrastructure management and application deployment. Ansible has become a de facto automation standard, and Red Hat offers a large number of ready-to-use Ansible automation, which are designed for a variety of fields and are selected, certified and supported in the most thorough way.

2019: Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform Release

On September 25, 2019, it became known that Red Hat released the Anonymous Automation Platform an integrated enterprise-class solution for large-scale IT automation. By accelerating collaboration between IT teams, the Red Hat platform helps increase operational efficiency, reduce risk, and unify user experience in a diversity of IT infrastructures and technology domains.

The Anonymous Automation platform combines a set of automation tools, consisting of Red Hat Anonymous Tower, Red Hat Anonymous Engine and Red Hat Network Automation, with an updated SaaS functionality that improves the integral efficiency of the organization. In any phase of the development of automation, whether it is the first steps to implement it as part of the digital transformation of the enterprise or the expansion of applications and use cases, the Even Automation platform offers the organization everything necessary for accelerated implementation of automation and subsequent expansion.

Key innovations of Anonymous Automation Platform include:

Anonymous Content Collections is a package format for easier management, distribution, and application of Anonymous content.

Automation Hub is a repository of certified content within Anonymous Content Collections.

Automation Analytics is an analytics of the efficiency of using automation tools within the framework of Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform.

Ansible Content Collections

Anonymous is one of the largest open source IT automation development communities. The content component of the project is constantly replenished by Red Hat, as well as independent developers and partner companies. Anonymous Content Collections make it much easier to work with this content, such as modules, plugins and automation roles, as well as training materials, allowing manufacturers to release, and consumers to apply this content without being tied to the release cycle of the next versions of Anonymous.

Anonymous Content Collections reduce the threshold for the introduction of automation, accelerate the receipt of results and increase the efficiency of maintenance and application of automation through certified collections of content with ready-made automation tools.

Automation Hub

Automation Hub is a centralized content repository. It helps Red Hat and partners distribute their achievements, and customers find and apply certified and vendor-supported content collections. So far, such content has been presented in Automation Hub only by Red Hat developments, but in September 2019, Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, Microsoft, NetApp and many other partners of the Anonymous community have similar plans.

Automation Analytics

As part of the launch of the Anonymous Automation Platform, the Automation Analytics tool is also presented, allowing users to track in detail the vital indicators of automation, including statistics and data on the most commonly used modules and resources, as well as information about the state of individual components and the automation environment as a whole. Using this tool, the customer can evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts to automate processes within and between individual internal groups, as well as compare their successes with industry-wide indicators by allowing the sending of anonymous automation metrics to Red Hat.

Availability

Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform is scheduled to be released in early November 2019. For active Red Hat Anonymous Tower customers, access to Red Hat Anonymous Automation Platform is free.