In November 2019, Red Hat announced the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, an enterprise-grade solution designed for building and operating automation at scale across an organization. The platform consolidates Red Hat’s existing automation tooling into a single, cohesive offering while introducing new SaaS-based capabilities aimed at improving collaboration, governance, and visibility across automation deployments.
What Is the Ansible Automation Platform?
The Ansible Automation Platform brings together several components under one umbrella:
- Red Hat Ansible Tower – the control plane for managing, scheduling, and delegating automation jobs
- Red Hat Ansible Engine – the core runtime that executes playbooks and modules
- Red Hat Network Automation – purpose-built automation for network infrastructure
- New SaaS capabilities – Ansible Content Collections, Automation Hub, and Automation Analytics
Whether an organization is just beginning its automation journey or looking to scale automation across additional use cases and domains, the platform is designed to reduce the time to value by providing reusable, certified building blocks instead of requiring teams to start from scratch.
Key New Capabilities
Three new features shipped with the Ansible Automation Platform launch address content management, certified content discovery, and operational visibility.
Ansible Content Collections
Ansible has one of the largest open-source automation communities in the world, producing a continuous stream of modules, plugins, roles, and playbooks from Red Hat engineers, independent contributors, and technology partners. Before Content Collections, distributing and consuming this content was tightly coupled to Ansible release cycles, making it difficult to ship or consume updates independently.
Ansible Content Collections introduce a new packaging format that decouples content distribution from core Ansible releases. A Collection bundles modules, plugins, roles, and playbooks into a single distributable unit, allowing contributors to publish updates on their own schedule and allowing consumers to adopt new content without waiting for a new Ansible Engine release.
Key benefits of Content Collections:
- Lowers the barrier to entry for new automation adopters by providing pre-built, ready-to-use content
- Reduces maintenance overhead by scoping updates to individual collections rather than requiring full platform upgrades
- Enables partners and contributors to ship certified automation content independently
Automation Hub
Automation Hub is the centralized, hosted repository where Red Hat and its certified partners publish Ansible Content Collections. For enterprise customers, it is the primary place to discover and consume content that has been tested and is backed by Red Hat support.
At the time of the platform launch, partners including Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and NetApp announced plans to publish certified, supported Collections through Automation Hub. This gives teams a curated, trusted source of automation content for common infrastructure and cloud platforms, reducing the risk associated with using community-sourced modules in production environments.
The distinction between certified content (available through Automation Hub) and community content (available through Ansible Galaxy) is important for enterprises with compliance or support requirements: certified Collections carry Red Hat’s quality and support guarantee, while Galaxy content does not.
Automation Analytics
Automation Analytics provides operational visibility into how automation is performing across an organization’s Ansible Automation Platform deployments. Rather than treating automation as a black box, the feature surfaces data that helps teams understand and improve their automation programs over time.
Automation Analytics surfaces information such as:
- Which modules and resources are used most frequently across the environment
- The overall health and performance of automation jobs
- Automation activity broken down by internal team or group
An opt-in benchmarking feature allows organizations to share anonymized automation metrics with Red Hat in exchange for seeing how their automation maturity compares to industry peer groups. This can help identify gaps and prioritize where to invest further in automation.
Why This Matters for DevOps and Platform Engineering Teams
The Ansible Automation Platform represents a shift in how Red Hat positions Ansible for enterprises: from a task-automation tool to a full automation operating model. The integration of content management (Collections), a certified content marketplace (Automation Hub), and operational telemetry (Automation Analytics) addresses three common friction points that organizations encounter as they try to scale automation beyond individual teams:
- Content sprawl – teams reinventing automation for the same systems because there is no shared, trusted library
- Governance gaps – uncertainty about whether community modules meet security or quality standards for production use
- Visibility deficits – no consistent way to measure automation coverage, performance, or ROI across the organization
By addressing these challenges within a single platform, Red Hat is positioning Ansible not just as an automation engine but as the foundation for an organization-wide automation practice.
Original announcement sourced from e3zine.com (November 2019).