Supporting your automation community effectively.
In this blog, we will learn about Supporting your automation community effectively.
Building a Strong Automation Community with Ansible Automation Platform
As we’ve discussed in previous articles, creating a community of practice around automation can significantly accelerate the adoption of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform within your organization. This collaborative approach helps teams implement automation more effectively and enhances the overall value of IT investments.
Today, we’ll explore key features within the Ansible Automation Platform that support this community-driven approach, helping teams to:
- Standardize automation development tools and workflows
- Improve onboarding for new users
- Share and reuse automation content via centralized repositories
- Develop cross-functional workflows across networking, cloud, security, and more
- Measure automation success and performance
Educating community members about these capabilities strengthens expertise and ensures consistency across teams.
Enhancing Automation Development with Ansible
Ansible VS Code Extension
Some members of your automation community may be new to Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a widely used source code editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Given its popularity and extensive ecosystem, VS Code is a powerful tool for writing automation scripts.
The Ansible extension for VS Code enhances automation efficiency by providing syntax highlighting, auto-completion, linting, and integration with AI-powered tools like Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watsonx Code Assistant. These features make it easier to develop Ansible content with greater accuracy and speed.
Ansible Development Tools
Ansible Automation Platform includes Ansible development tools, a set of integrated and supported capabilities designed to streamline automation creation, testing, and deployment. These tools—accessible through the VS Code extension—enable automation engineers of all skill levels to work consistently while improving productivity.
By using Ansible development tools, teams can build execution environments, perform validation checks, and test playbooks, all within a curated package that simplifies the development process.
Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed
Ansible Lightspeed is a generative AI-powered service that helps teams create, refine, and maintain Ansible content more efficiently. By leveraging IBM WatsonX Code Assistant, it translates natural language prompts into Ansible code while ensuring best practices are followed.
Additionally, Ansible Lightspeed is evolving into a virtual assistant, embedded directly within the Ansible Automation Platform. This AI-powered chatbot will provide on-demand support, offering insights and answers to Ansible-related questions by drawing from Red Hat documentation and other trusted sources.
Ansible Development Workspaces (Coming Soon)
Ansible development workspaces will provide on-demand, one-click provisioning of a fully configured Ansible development environment. This will include access to VS Code, Ansible development tools, Ansible Lightspeed, and more—eliminating setup time and streamlining content creation, testing, and deployment.
Streamlining Content Management with Automation Hubs
Ansible Automation Hub and Private Automation Hub
The Ansible automation hub serves as a central repository for discovering, downloading, and managing Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections—prebuilt modules, plugins, and roles developed by Red Hat and its partners, including Cisco, Microsoft, CyberArk, and ServiceNow.
For organizations requiring a secure internal repository, the private automation hub provides a trusted source for automation content. It ensures teams deploy content that aligns with organizational standards, supporting consistency and compliance across automation initiatives.
Ansible Plugins for Red Hat Developer Hub
Ansible plugins for Red Hat Developer Hub offer an integrated experience with curated learning paths, push-button content creation, and development tools. These resources help new users quickly learn Ansible while empowering experienced teams with productivity-enhancing capabilities.
By using Red Hat Developer Hub as a central access point, community members can familiarize themselves with Ansible syntax, utilize integrated tooling, and maintain adherence to best practices when developing automation content.
Scaling Automation with Workflows and Event-Driven Actions
Automation Workflows
While automating individual tasks is beneficial, achieving greater efficiency requires workflows that integrate multiple IT teams and processes. By building structured workflows, teams can reduce errors, minimize manual dependencies, and free up resources for strategic projects.
Automation workflows allow teams to connect multiple job templates and orchestrate complex processes, even when different playbooks, inventories, or permissions are involved.
Event-Driven Ansible
Event-Driven Ansible extends workflow automation by enabling systems to proactively respond to events in the IT environment. For instance, organizations can start with simple use cases like automated ticket enrichment in ServiceNow and progress to fully automated, closed-loop remediation—where tickets are created, playbooks execute corrective actions, and tickets are resolved without manual intervention.
As teams advance their automation capabilities, discussing which use cases to tackle first and how to scale automation should remain a key part of the community of practice strategy.
Monitoring and Measuring Automation Performance
Automation Analytics and Red Hat Insights
As automation adoption grows, tracking performance and measuring impact becomes essential. Automation analytics provides reports and dashboards that highlight return on investment (ROI), time savings, and job success rates. These insights help teams refine automation strategies and demonstrate value to leadership.
Additionally, Red Hat Insights monitors infrastructure health, identifying performance issues, security vulnerabilities, and system availability concerns. Insights-generated alerts can also be used as triggers for Event-Driven Ansible, enabling automated remediation and proactive management.
Driving Enterprise-Wide Automation Success
By fostering a community of practice, organizations can accelerate their automation journey and maximize the benefits of Ansible Automation Platform. Standardizing tools, sharing knowledge, and leveraging automation analytics enable teams to work more efficiently and strategically.
Ansible’s growing ecosystem—including AI-powered assistance, development tools, event-driven automation, and workflow orchestration—empowers IT teams to tackle complex challenges while maintaining agility and innovation.
Building a collaborative automation culture and embracing these capabilities will ensure long-term success in IT automation initiatives.
