Source: ZDNet (original reporting, April 2020)
Overview
Red Hat announced a series of updates to the Ansible Automation Platform, its enterprise-grade automation solution that helps DevOps teams create, manage, and share resources for automating application and infrastructure deployments. The updates span three key areas: a new Automation Services Catalog, expanded certified content, and improved analytics capabilities.
The Ansible Automation Platform was introduced in late 2019 with the goal of enabling scalable, enterprise-wide automation across projects and teams. Red Hat framed the April 2020 updates as particularly relevant given the economic pressures organizations were facing at the time, emphasizing the platform’s value proposition of helping enterprises “do more with less.”
Automation Services Catalog
Scheduled for a late May 2020 rollout, the Automation Services Catalog provides organizations with a structured way to govern and extend automation across the enterprise while maintaining compliance requirements and internal controls.
Key capabilities of the Automation Services Catalog include:
- Lifecycle management for automation resources, enabling teams to track and govern automation assets from creation through retirement.
- Compliance and controls enforcement, ensuring that automation resources meet organizational policy requirements before being deployed broadly across teams.
- A centralized service interface that makes it easier to offer automation capabilities as self-service resources to different teams and business units.
Expanded Certified Content in Ansible Content Collections
Red Hat significantly expanded the certified content available through Ansible Content Collections, the packaging format that allows users to share and consume reusable automation content including modules, plugins, roles, and playbooks.
At the time of the announcement, Automation Hub—the centralized content repository for Red Hat and its certified partners—hosted more than 1,200 certified Ansible Modules. This represented a dramatic increase from approximately 100 modules available in November 2019, reflecting rapid growth in Red Hat’s partner ecosystem and content certification program.
Automation Hub serves as the trusted source for certified, supported content, offering DevOps teams confidence in the quality and compatibility of the automation resources they consume.
Enhanced Analytics Capabilities
Red Hat also introduced new analytics features within the platform to give operators and engineers deeper visibility into automation performance. The enhancements focus on helping teams understand how their automation is running and where improvements can be made.
New and improved analytics features include:
- Improved filtering: Users can now filter analytics down to individual Red Hat Ansible Tower clusters and filter results by date range.
- New job statistics: Metrics now include total runs, total execution time, average execution time, overall success rate, and identification of the most frequently failed task.
- Organizational comparison filters: Within organizational statistics, new filters allow teams to compare automation adoption rates and activity across different internal organizations or business units.
These analytics improvements are aimed at helping platform administrators and DevOps leads demonstrate the value of automation investments and identify bottlenecks or reliability issues in their automation workflows.
Why These Updates Matter for DevOps Teams
Taken together, these updates address three common challenges DevOps teams face when scaling automation across an enterprise:
- Governance at scale: The Automation Services Catalog helps platform operators enforce policies and compliance requirements without blocking teams from consuming automation resources.
- Content quality and discovery: The growth in certified modules reduces the risk of relying on untested community content and makes it easier to find supported integrations for common platforms and services.
- Operational visibility: The new analytics features close the feedback loop, allowing teams to measure automation effectiveness and troubleshoot failures more efficiently.
For DevOps engineers evaluating or already running the Ansible Automation Platform, the April 2020 updates represented a meaningful step toward making enterprise-scale automation more manageable, observable, and compliant.