At AnsibleFest 2022 in the “windy city” Chicago, Red Hat announced Ansible Automation Platform’s upcoming availability in AWS Marketplace. That day is here!  

I’d like to take a few moments to provide some more details about this offering and why you should be considering Ansible Automation Platform in AWS Marketplace.

As organization’s hybrid cloud environments continue to grow in complexity, so does the need to increase efficiency and speed. The solution is to leverage an automation platform that can help any organization create, manage, and scale their automation efforts across the entire IT infrastructure. Ansible Automation Platform is the glue that can coordinate and scale automation across all IT domains.

 

AWS Marketplace deployment

Ansible Automation Platform deploys directly from the AWS Marketplace as a self-managed application. There are many benefits of deploying Ansible Automation Platform in AWS Marketplace.

1. It deploys into your environment, where you have total control over the solution.
2. Ongoing upgrades will be simpler because of this deployment model, so while this is a self-managed solution, it’s still simpler to maintain than if you had started from scratch yourself.
3. The ability to scale out the Ansible Automation Platform environment using extension nodes. (I’ll write a blog on extension nodes in the coming weeks to provide more details on this – stay tuned!)
4. It takes advantage of the many AWS services you are accustomed to, including AWS billing, and you can take advantage of any committed spend you have with AWS.
5. You get world class support from Red Hat!

How do you get started with Ansible Automation Platform in AWS Marketplace? Simply visit AWS Marketplace and search for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Subscribe to the offering, and then you can quickly deploy the solution by launching the CloudFormation stack. There will be some configuration you need to provide for your environment.

This will take about 30 minutes or so; it installs into a private Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.  As a result, there will be some network configuration required to access the automation controller UI, and the private automation hub UI. Once that’s complete, you’ll be able to log in to Ansible Automation Platform.

 

AWS Integrations

For many organizations using AWS today, there’s a huge benefit in taking advantage of Ansible Automation Platform in AWS Marketplace. It runs in your AWS account. It integrates seamlessly with many of the AWS services, including AWS billing. Additionally, if you have AWS committed spend, this solution will count towards that spend agreement, and will be reflected on your AWS bill.

Speaking of integration, you will have access to the Amazon AWS Collection that includes Ansible content to automate the management of AWS resources. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections provides the ability to integrate with many different technologies, and simplifies automation against these technologies. Ansible Automation Platform becomes the glue that brings together and centralizes all your automation needs.

Once you’ve deployed Ansible Automation Platform, with a few simple configuration steps, you can integrate with identity providers (like AD, LDAP, etc) to provide single sign-on, in addition to being able to leverage Ansible Automation Platforms role based access control (RBAC) capabilities.

 

Automation Content

Anyone using Ansible Automation Platform in AWS will definitely want to start by using the Red Hat Ansible Certified Collection for Amazon AWS. With your Ansible Automation Platform subscription, you have access to all the Red Hat Certified Content available on Ansible automation hub.

The AWS Collection includes over 80 modules to interrogate, manage, and automate numerous AWS resource types. From AWS AD, to networking, to databases, to AWS Kubernetes services, to storage, to backup, to virtual machines, to security groups, to Identity and Access Management (IAM)… and so much more.  

If you’d like to see the full list of modules you can check it out here on Ansible automation hub.  

There’s some great automation content that we make available for you to leverage with examples to learn from if you’re new to using Ansible Automation Platform in AWS.

Here’s a GitHub repository that has automation content for automating some AWS network resources, like creating VPC networking that includes peer networks, or transit networks, and more.

https://github.com/ansible-content-lab/aws.infrastructure_config_demos.git

Remember to take advantage of the many Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections you can find on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. There’s a high probability that the technologies you use today have certified collections here, and enable you to automate many of the use cases you have today.

https://console.redhat.com/ansible/automation-hub

The image below shows a subset of what’s available.

Is this just for automating in AWS?

A question that often comes up is:  “If I access Ansible Automation Platform in AWS, does that mean I can only perform automation against AWS resources?” The great thing about Ansible Automation Platform is that it doesn’t matter where you are running it from. You are able to automate public cloud, private cloud, physical and virtual environments, and edge resources. Obviously, one of the requirements is having proper networking configuration and connectivity. Deploy Ansible Automation Platform in AWS, and automate anywhere!

The automation use cases are endless, and there are so many efficiencies and savings to gain by leveraging Ansible Automation Platform, not to mention the reduction in human errors, and the increased collaboration amongst the different IT domains.

 

What can I do next?

To learn more about Ansible Automation Platform in AWS Marketplace, visit the page here. You can watch the demo video covering this core automation use case for AWS – deploying and retiring cloud resources.

Try the hands on self-paced Ansible Automation Platform in AWS labs. There’s multiple labs covering these topics:

• Cloud Operations (Day-2 operations on AWS)
• Infrastructure Optimization (Cloud control on AWS)
• Infrastructure Visibility (Infrastructure awareness and reporting on AWS)

For hands on self-paced lab(s) on Ansible Automation Platform, you can visit here. You can also take a look at theAnsible Automation Platform in AWS documentation.