Originally reported by it-online.co.za. This article is based on the Red Hat general availability announcement from September 2019.
Overview
Red Hat announced the general availability of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, an enterprise-grade solution designed for building and operating automation at scale across an entire organisation. The platform consolidates Red Hat’s existing automation portfolio and adds new SaaS-based capabilities to improve cross-team collaboration, reduce operational risk, and deliver a consistent user experience across infrastructure and technology domains.
The platform integrates three established products — Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat Ansible Engine, and Red Hat Network Automation — and extends them with three new capabilities: Ansible Content Collections, Automation Hub, and Automation Analytics.
Ansible Content Collections
Ansible Content Collections introduce a new packaging format that changes how Ansible content is managed, distributed, and consumed. Previously, modules, plugins, roles, and playbooks were bundled with Ansible itself, meaning users had to wait for a new Ansible release before accessing updated or new content.
Collections decouple content from Ansible’s core release cycle. Contributors — whether Red Hat engineers, independent developers, or technology partners — can publish and update Collections independently. This gives end users faster access to new integrations and fixes without needing to upgrade the Ansible engine itself.
Key benefits of Ansible Content Collections include:
- A standardised packaging format covering modules, plugins, roles, and playbooks in a single distributable unit.
- Decoupled release cadence — content updates no longer depend on core Ansible releases.
- Certified Collections that ship with pre-built, tested automation, reducing time to value for new adopters.
- Lower barrier to entry for teams getting started with automation at scale.
Automation Hub
Automation Hub is the centralised repository where Red Hat and its certified partners publish Ansible Content Collections. It gives customers a single, trusted location to discover, download, and consume certified, supported content.
Content published through Automation Hub carries Red Hat’s certification, meaning it has been tested and is backed by Red Hat support. At launch, technology partners including Cisco, F5, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and NetApp committed to making certified Collections available through the Hub, enabling users to quickly deploy vendor-specific automation without building integrations from scratch.
Automation Hub addresses a longstanding challenge for enterprise Ansible users: finding trustworthy, maintained content from a sprawling open source ecosystem. By providing a curated, partner-certified layer, it reduces the risk of using unmaintained or untested community modules in production environments.
Automation Analytics
Automation Analytics provides visibility into how automation is performing across an organisation’s Ansible deployments. Key data surfaces include:
- Which modules and resources are used most frequently.
- The overall health and performance of the automation environment over time.
- Statistics on automation actions broken down by team or internal group.
A notable opt-in feature allows customers to benchmark their automation efforts against anonymised industry peer-group metrics shared with Red Hat. This gives organisations a way to understand how their automation maturity compares to similar enterprises, without exposing sensitive operational data.
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6 Updates
The Ansible Automation Platform launch also incorporated the capabilities shipped in Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.6. Notable additions include:
- Ansible Content Collections support: Tower can now run playbooks that reference Ansible Content Collections, bridging the new packaging format with existing Tower-managed workflows.
- Webhook integration with GitLab and GitHub: Tower can automatically trigger automation runs or deployments in response to source code pushes and other source control events, tightening the integration between CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure automation.
- Pause and approval steps in workflows: Operators can now insert human-approval gates at any point in a Tower workflow, giving teams the ability to enforce change-management processes without leaving the Tower interface.
- Scalable execution via Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (tech preview): Tower gained the ability to offload playbook execution to OpenShift, increasing runtime capacity and scalability for large-scale deployments.
Why This Matters for DevOps Teams
The Ansible Automation Platform represents a shift from Ansible as a standalone tool to Ansible as a managed, enterprise automation ecosystem. For DevOps and platform engineering teams, the practical implications are significant:
- Governance at scale: Automation Hub and certified Collections give platform teams a defensible content supply chain — critical in regulated industries.
- Observability: Automation Analytics fills a gap that previously required custom tooling to understand automation health and usage patterns.
- GitOps alignment: The Tower webhook integrations with GitHub and GitLab support event-driven automation workflows that align with modern GitOps practices.
- Change control: Pause-and-approve workflow steps make it practical to enforce ITIL-style approval gates within automated pipelines.
Organisations already using Ansible Engine or Tower can adopt these features incrementally, while organisations evaluating enterprise automation for the first time now have a more complete platform to assess.