Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 unlocks your automation potential
Here in this blog, we will learn about Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 unlocks your automation potential.
Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 has been developed to simplify the creation, deployment, and scaling of essential IT automation workflows throughout the organization. Featuring a revamped platform experience, enhanced capabilities, and significant performance improvements, this release aims to assist customers in expediting adoption, exploring new use cases, and deriving greater strategic value from their automation efforts. Let us now explore the new features in detail.
An Enhanced Platform Experience
The introduction of Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 brings forth a revamped interface that significantly improves the experience for operators, developers, and platform administrators. The integrated user interface offers a cohesive and centralized WebUI, API, authentication, authorization, and role-based access controls (RBAC). Additionally, within this unified interface, users will have the capability to leverage extensive reporting through automation analytics, which features an automation calculator that provides insights into the return on investment (ROI) associated with the Ansible Automation Platform.
A new feature, termed quick starts, will be introduced as part of the enhanced platform experience. These quick starts consist of interactive, step-by-step guides designed to facilitate a swift initiation into essential tasks and features of the Ansible Automation Platform. This initiative aims to assist new users within your organization in acquiring the necessary skills to effectively utilize the Ansible Automation Platform.
Integrated development tools and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) functionalities.
Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, in collaboration with IBM Watson Code Assistant, introduces enhanced capabilities and features that significantly broaden the influence of Generative AI on the Ansible experience, including:
- Creation of a comprehensive Ansible Playbook utilizing a straightforward text prompt.
- A user-friendly chat interface designed for optimal convenience.
- Real-time enhancement of prompts to improve contextual precision and accuracy.
- A comprehensive guide is provided to assist users in grasping the rationale and framework of both new and existing playbooks.
Ansible Lightspeed is now accessible for on-premises deployment in disconnected or regulated environments, and it will feature authentication support for workstations, development containers, and Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces.We have optimized the process for your teams to assess the advantages of Ansible Lightspeed by offering a trial experience that can be initiated with a single click and lasts for 90 days.
The Ansible development tools package included with the platform has undergone recent updates designed to improve developers’ efficiency. This suite of enterprise-level automation development tools is meticulously curated and supported, facilitating automation developers in the creation, testing, and deployment of Ansible content. These tools seamlessly integrate into current workflows, allowing seasoned content creators to produce Ansible content swiftly and with precision.
Instruments for coordinating activities throughout the organization.
Enhance your automation capabilities by leveraging the automatic response to evolving IT conditions through Event-Driven Ansible. The 2.5 release presents event streams, an innovative feature tailored for Event-Driven Ansible. This addition will streamline the process of event routing, facilitating the transfer of events from their origin to your rulebooks.
Event streams facilitate:
- Webhook-based sources are automatically directed to one or multiple configured rulebook activations.
- Event-driven Ansible for managing the distribution of events to horizontally scaled rulebook activations.
- Event-Driven Ansible has been enhanced to accept events from a broader range of sources. Any system capable of generating webhooks, such as GitHub, Service-Now, GitLab, and others, can now directly transmit events for processing by the Ansible Automation Platform.
Event-driven Ansible will feature enhancements tailored for enterprise use, such as improved high availability and scalability, advanced credential management, and the integration of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) alongside Single Sign-On (SSO). Clients who are not prepared to transition from their current Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 deployments can still benefit from the new functionalities of Event-Driven Ansible by connecting a new Ansible 2.5 deployment driven by events to their current Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 environment.
Beginning Your Journey with Ansible Automation Platform 2.5.
Are you prepared to begin utilizing Ansible Automation Platform 2.5? Determine which option is most suitable for your needs.
Option 1 | For a new customer or deployment, you can initiate a fresh on-premises installation by downloading Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 from the Red Hat Customer Portal. Begin your journey today.
Option 2 | Ansible for Cloud Deployments Do you prefer to oversee your automation platform independently in the cloud, utilize managed cloud services, or leverage committed cloud expenditure agreements? Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 is accessible on Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.
Option 3 | Migration from Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. Customers must ensure they are using the most recent version of Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 in order to proceed with the upgrade to version 2.5. Comprehensive instructions and a complete migration pathway will be made available later in October.
In this update, Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 will present deployment topologies that have been tested by Red Hat and are available in both the documentation and deployment inventories. These topologies serve as reference architectures that are proven to function effectively on the tested hardware and within defined workload parameters. The inclusion of these inventories will facilitate a quicker initiation with the Ansible Automation Platform—simply input your infrastructure details and execute the setup, after which the Ansible Automation Platform will commence operation. Over time, the topologies and inventory files will be enhanced to accommodate various deployment models of the Ansible Automation Platform, considering factors such as CPU architectures, redundancy needs, networking configurations, and more.
Upon the deployment of the Ansible Automation Platform, users can access the validated content provided in the Ansible Automation Hub. This validated content serves as a catalyst for generating new automation ideas and accelerates the development of automation across various domains. Examples of such applications include:
- Enhanced configuration as code functionalities for the Ansible Automation Platform.
- Infrastructure and operating system technologies such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Windows Server.
- Major cloud service providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure.
- Network operations including the management of Access Control Lists (ACLs), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), network interfaces, Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs).
Important points to consider:
- Customers who are not prepared to upgrade their current Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 deployments can still benefit from the new Event-Driven Ansible features by integrating a new Event-Driven Ansible 2.5 deployment with their existing Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 environment.
- Upon the availability of upgrades from version 2.4, users will have the capability to authenticate utilizing their credentials from various individual services.
- Upon the availability of upgrades from version 2.4, users will be able to consolidate their accounts upon their initial login.
- Once upgrades from version 2.4 are released, the Services API will continue to be accessible; however, it is anticipated that it will be phased out in the subsequent version 2.5.