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Ansible

Score9.2 out of 10

339 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Ansible?

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.

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Categories & Use Cases

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Ansible Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Ansible has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 339 ratings of Ansible's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Infrastructure Automation

    Automate the setup of systems to achieve their desired state using configuration files.

    Category average: 9

  • Automated Provisioning

    Automatically and systematically deploy, configure, and manage IT infrastructure and resources.

    Category average: 8.8

  • Parallel Execution

    Allows for the simultaneous execution of configuration changes across multiple nodes or components.

    Category average: 8.5

Areas for Improvement

  • Version Control

    Track changes made to configurations over time. Allowing for rollback to previous configurations if needed.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Node Management

    Allows for the administration and oversight of individual devices or systems within a network.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Reporting & Logging

    Generate reports and logs to track changes made to configurations, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing.

    Category average: 7.7

Who Buys & Uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Based on HG Insights installation data
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#1 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

29.7%

11,630 installations of 39,124

“We plan to automate the VM customizations using it, like copying custom apps into /opt, performing Zabbix registration, Mounting AWS Netapp ONTAP FSX volumes, etc automatically.”

— Senior Software Archirect, Primis (51-200 employees)
Verified Review
#2 most frequent

Information

17.3%

6,769 installations of 39,124

“Automation across all business units and silos.”

— SA, EMergent (11-50 employees)
Verified Review
#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

9.5%

3,703 installations of 39,124

“I got all my time back, we have 500 servers, can push a button in Ansible right away without much coding experience in YAML. Just time saved.”

— Linux Administrator, Blue Cross from Blue Shield of Alabama (1001-5000 employees)
Verified Review

Ansible Reviews

What users are saying about Ansible.
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Pros

  • Automating diverse IT operations (business processes, cloud deployments, infrastructure management)
  • Agentless architecture simplifies deployment across numerous devices
  • Ease of use and lower barrier to entry for automation tasks

Cons

  • User interface and overall user experience require modernization
  • Documentation needs to be more comprehensive and example-rich
  • Upgrade processes are complex and can be challenging

Perfect combination of many features.

Incentivized
Asad KhanView profile
Systems Solution Architect in Engineering at Nokia (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a Systems Architect, I deploy K8s clusters and set up deployment systems as a PoC in my lab, and troubleshoot the same in production. Most deployments involve multi-cluster 5G network nodes on any CaaS layer. Ansible helps me automatically configure node settings on top of any IaC tool. This includes multi-OS configuration, simplification of network device configuration, patching, and other related tasks.

Pros

  • It reduces custom scripting efforts because everything can be scripted in simple, human-readable YAML playbooks.
  • Not only servers, but also network devices, VMs, Containers, Kubernetes clusters, etc., can be automated via Ansible, showcasing its extensive list of supported devices.
  • It is agentless, which makes it lightweight and allows for easy integration into CI/CD and GitOps pipelines.
  • Many Tier-1 telcos use Ansible for Day 0/1/2 automation of RAN, transport, and core infrastructure (e.g., network function lifecycle management, NE configuration push, patching VNFs).

Cons

  • Ansible is still not truly declarative like Terraform.
  • Simple automation is fine, but creating complex, scalable automation scripts is very difficult to learn.
  • For a higher number of nodes, Ansible consumes a lot of resources. It needs the paid version of AAP, which requires a cost.

Return on Investment

  • In terms of time, around 70-80 % of savings can be achieved as compared to manually patching the nodes.
  • In terms of network deployment, automating Day-0 and Day-1 of network configuration can result in an overall reduction of 30-40%.
  • In terms of headcount, a reduction of around 40% in human resources can be achieved, as the same team can handle more tasks with Ansible.
  • Depending on scale, the overall ROI of 50-100% can be achieved in 1-3 years

Usability

Alternatives Considered

HashiCorp Terraform, Open Source Puppet and Red Hat OpenShift

Automating my job is a life goal.

Incentivized
Travis KesslerView profile
System Administrator II in Information Technology at SNC (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Ansible helps us achieve and maintain CMMC compliance. Any time a new asset is brought online, we use Ansible to ensure the correct settings are applied. Ansible also verifies that all assets in the inventory have the proper settings applied. We also use it to generate monthly reports for tracking.

Pros

  • Automate deployment.
  • Verify CMMC compliance.
  • Generate reports from across assets of different types including network equipment.

Cons

  • While it can work with Windows OS it is limited and still has room for improvement.
  • Initial setup can be difficult.

Return on Investment

  • Implementing and sustaining compliance standards in our lab would be a massive task without Ansible. Compliance is essential for our customers and stakeholders.

Usability

Other Software Used

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), VMware vSphere, macOS

From Manual to Managed Our Journey with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate many tasks on our server and network infrastructure.Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform saves me and my colleagues many hours per month handling menial tasks such as setting a base configuration for a new VM or setting up a networking switch with a preset configuration for a certain office or department.We currently use it at all levels of our IT infrastructure.

Pros

  • Provisioning VM’s, in our use case we have playbooks for our Linux vm’s, to set a hardened base configuration to build off to deploy new applications or infrastructure.
  • Config/access management, we have written playbooks to ensure consistency of our infrastructure and network devices. So, Security settings ssh keys etc... are the same across our whole infrastructure.
  • Application management, we use it to deploy custom applications, manage software updates across our Linux infrastructure and quickly deploy changes to these applications to ensure compliance with an ever-changing landscape of security requirements.

Cons

  • I only use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in SSH, a few of my colleagues use Automation Controller, I find the GUI a bit clunky and unresponsive.
  • There’s a bit of a learning curve to setting up and using the tool but once you get the hang of the logic it’s a great tool
  • No native gitops workflow, would be nice to have a version control and a rollback feature for playbooks.

Return on Investment

  • The only negative point is the learning curve and time to invest in learning the tool, if you want to master it and use it.
  • Time saved after creating your playbooks to handle menial tasks, which can save you many hours per week, depending on what you automate.
  • The more you invest in it the more you can get out, it can’t do everything but all the tasks it handles is the more time me and my colleagues can work on projects.

Usability

Other Software Used

Proxmox VE, NGINX, F5 BIG-IP

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Contributor in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps my organization by giving a centralized automation platform. Teams can write their own automation in their own environments, upload it to their repository, and launch it from Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. By having Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, it also forces teams to write Ansible playbooks correctly and follow the correct role structure that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses. It addresses the need for a centralized automation platform and a place where automation can be ran. Reducing the number of prod-like environments spun up by various teams to launch their automation.

Pros

  • Centralize the launching of Ansible automation
  • Centralize the hosting of modules, collections, plugins, etc.
  • Role-based access for teams and their users
  • Holding execution environments

Cons

  • Better documentation on role-based access controls
  • Adding in builtin repository syncing
  • Better documentation on launching templates via API call

Return on Investment

  • More teams are interested in using Ansible to automate because of the platform
  • No numbers just yet as teams are still getting onboarded and the organization is still young when it comes to automating

Usability

Save time and avoid complications.

Incentivized
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform so that developers in the DevOps cycle can automatically deploy new versions of applications directly from integration with Jenkins.We also automate tasks such as user management within Linux servers from systems.

Pros

  • Flow control
  • Segmentation of user roles and permissions
  • Integration with other platforms
  • Simple language when programming playbooks

Cons

  • Complexity of configuration and maintenance

Return on Investment

  • Reduce the time that system operations need to perform their tasks.
  • Allows inexperienced users to make changes without causing disruption.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Control-M and HashiCorp Terraform

Other Software Used

HashiCorp Terraform, 11:11 Solutions for AWS, Control-M