This article is based on a summary originally sourced from e3zine.com (November 2019). Technical details reflect the state of Red Hat Ansible at that time.
The Problem: IT Silos and Manual Processes
Most IT departments share a common set of structural problems. Diverse application portfolios, fragmented toolchains, and independently acting business units create persistent IT silos. When departments operate without central coordination, shadow IT flourishes — teams adopt their own tools outside of IT governance, making the overall environment harder to manage, audit, and secure.
The resulting processes tend to be slow, error-prone, and inflexible. Security risks increase as untracked systems and configurations proliferate. Digital transformation initiatives stall because there is no consistent foundation on which to build automated, repeatable workflows.
Why Automation Alone Is Not Enough
Automation is widely recognized as a key enabler of operational efficiency, standardization, and DevOps adoption. However, a critical distinction must be made: automating individual silos in isolation does not solve the underlying problem. Automated silos are still silos.
Effective automation requires a cross-functional approach. Previously separate, standalone tools must be integrated into coherent workflows. That integration demands specialist knowledge spread across multiple teams and departments, which introduces coordination overhead, delays, and compatibility challenges.
A unified automation platform addresses these challenges by providing a common language and toolchain that all teams can use — without requiring every team to understand the implementation details of every other team’s systems.
Red Hat Ansible Automation
Red Hat Ansible addresses the cross-team automation challenge through its modular architecture. Ansible allows teams to encapsulate their domain-specific knowledge in playbooks and roles — reusable, human-readable units of automation written in YAML. These individual playbooks can then be composed into larger, multi-stage workflows without requiring each team to expose or share proprietary implementation details.
This model makes it possible for a networking team, a security team, and an application team to each maintain their own automation assets while still contributing to a shared, end-to-end process. Ansible acts as the integrating layer across previously disconnected domains.
Example: Automating SAP HANA Deployments
A concrete use case for Ansible automation is the deployment and configuration of SAP HANA, an in-memory database with strict, well-documented setup requirements. SAP defines these requirements through SAP Notes — detailed technical documents that cover platform-specific installation and configuration steps. Manually following SAP Notes is time-consuming and introduces the risk of missed or misinterpreted steps, which can affect both system stability and SAP’s support eligibility for production environments.
The standard HANA installation process involves the following stages:
- Hardware provisioning or virtual machine setup
- Installation and configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
- Installation and configuration of SAP HANA
- System validation and customization
- Integration into the regular maintenance and patching cycle
By translating the relevant SAP Notes into Ansible Playbooks and Roles, teams can automate all of these stages — from OS configuration through HANA installation, validation, and customization. The reported outcome of this approach is a reduction in setup time from days to minutes. Ansible roles also support more complex topologies, including scale-up and scale-out environments, HANA System Replication, and high-availability configurations using Pacemaker.
Red Hat Ansible Tower
Red Hat Ansible Tower (now available as Ansible Automation Platform in more recent releases) serves as the enterprise control plane for Ansible automation. It provides the management and governance capabilities needed to operationalize Ansible at scale across an organization.
Key features of Ansible Tower include:
- RESTful API and self-service portal: Enables integration with existing ITSM tools, CI/CD pipelines, and custom dashboards, making automation accessible to non-CLI users across the business.
- Centralized inventory management: Maintains a single source of truth for all managed hosts, supporting dynamic inventory sources for cloud and on-premises environments.
- Role-based access control (RBAC): Restricts what each team or user can view, run, or modify, enforcing least-privilege principles across automation workflows.
- Credential management: Stores and injects secrets securely without exposing them in playbooks or logs.
- End-to-end audit trail: Logs every job run with full output, enabling traceability and compliance reporting.
- Workflow orchestration: Chains multiple playbooks into complex, multi-stage workflows with conditional branching and parallel execution.
Configuration Management and Patch Lifecycle
Beyond initial deployment, Ansible — used in combination with Red Hat Satellite — supports ongoing configuration management, patch management, and release management throughout the operational lifecycle. This means that the same automation assets used for initial provisioning can be reused to enforce configuration drift remediation and apply updates consistently across environments.
Staging workflows are also supported. Identical environments can be instantiated in a cloud provider for quality assurance, pre-production testing of patches, or upgrade and migration validation, before changes are applied to production systems.
Development Workflow and Continuous Testing
Ansible playbook development has a relatively low barrier to entry due to YAML’s readability. Changes to playbooks should be continuously tested using a dedicated developer platform or pipeline. A recommended practice is to trigger test runs across multiple deployment scenarios — such as scale-up, scale-out, system replication, and Pacemaker configurations — whenever a playbook change is committed. This ensures that modifications do not introduce regressions across any of the supported topologies.
Key Takeaways
- IT silos and manual processes are a primary obstacle to digital transformation — automation must span organizational boundaries, not just individual tools.
- Red Hat Ansible uses playbooks and roles to encapsulate team-specific automation while enabling cross-functional workflow composition.
- SAP HANA deployment is a practical example where Ansible can reduce setup time significantly by codifying SAP Notes into reusable automation assets.
- Ansible Tower provides the enterprise governance layer — RBAC, auditing, APIs, and workflow orchestration — needed to scale Ansible across an organization.
- Combined with Red Hat Satellite, Ansible covers the full lifecycle: provisioning, configuration management, patching, and release management.