Ansible Links

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Curated list of Ansible resources online organized by topic.

Learning

• Get started with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Get started with Ansible in three parts: Create, manage and scale by Red Hat Developer.
• DO007 - Ansible Basics: Automation Technical Overview (FREE): Series of on-demand, online videos that introduce you to the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Learn configuration management, provisioning, deploying, and managing compute infrastructure across cloud, virtual, and physical environments with Ansible.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: A beginner’s guide: Concise guide to Ansible Automation Platform, its benefits, and information to help you make the right decisions for your organization's automation practice.
• Ansible Blog

Labs

• Ansible Automation Platform Self-Paced Labs (Instruqt): Hands-on learning scenarios provide you with a preconfigured Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform environment to experiment, practice, and see how automation can relieve you of manual tasks.
• Ansible Instruqt: This repo contains images and tracks for the instruqt platform. Red Hat is using Instruqt for in-browser demonstrations of the Ansible Automation Platform.
  • Introduction to cloud automation
• Ansible Self-Paced Labs (Community): Interactive learning scenarios provide you with a pre-configured Ansible environment to experiment, learn, and see how Ansible can help you solve real-world problems. The environment runs entirely in your browser at your convenience, enabling you to learn more about our technology at your pace and time.
• Ansible Automation Platform 2 Workshops: The Red Hat Ansible Automation Workshops project is intended for effectively demonstrating Ansible’s capabilities through instructor-led workshops or self-paced exercises.
• Official Ansible Product Demos
  • Instruqt Ansible Product Demos

Red Hat Ansible content finder

• Decks: For Red Hat employees and partners.
• e-Books: Hybrid Cloud Automation, Network Automation, Event-Driven Ansible (EDA), Security, Edge and more.
• Collaterals: This webpage includes links to all non-slide collateral including datasheets, whitepapers, briefs, checklists, infographics and overviews.

Videos:

• Ansible on-demand webinars & training
• Ansible Videos
• Alex Dworjan videos: Collection of 15-minute AAP walk-thoughs by Alex Dworjan.
• Jeff Geerling's Ansible 101 for Linux server administration: Playlist with 15 videos, based on the best-selling book Ansible for DevOps.
• Ansible Fest
  • Atlanta 2019
  • Virtual 2020
  • Virtual 2021
  • Chicago 2022

Ansible features

Automation Hub

• How to get started with Ansible Private Automation Hub: Learn how to use Red Hat Ansible Automation Private Automation Hub.
• Control your content with private Automation Hub: Private Automation Hub is a self-hosted Ansible content management system. Organizations can host private hubs on their own infrastructure and manage it themselves. Similar to how Red Hat Satellite enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to manage operating system content, private Automation Hub enables automation teams to manage Ansible automation content. Private Automation Hub allows curation and distribution of Ansible content as close as possible to Ansible Automation Platform clusters.

Callback Modules

• Reference for Ansible Callback Modules
• Examples of the stdout or callback plugins
• Provisioning Callbacks

Collections

• Getting Started With Ansible Content Collections: Ansible Content Collections, or collections, represent the new standard of distributing, maintaining and consuming automation. Combine multiple types of Ansible content (playbooks, roles, modules, and plugins) by Colin McNaughton.
• Hands on with Ansible collections: Content is divided between two repositories: Ansible Galaxy and Automation Hub by Ajay Chenampara.
• Ansible Supported Collections, Versioning, and Release Strategy: Guidance for Certified Ansible content that is fully supported as part of the Ansible Automation Platform subscription. These Ansible Content Collections are a subset of the larger certified Collection library housed on Ansible Automation Hub.
• Collection Index: Collections with docs hosted on docs.ansible.com.

Event Driven Automation

• Event-Driven Ansible: Event-Driven Ansible top-level page.
• Self-paced lab: Take this interactive, self-paced lab to learn how Event-Driven Ansible works.
• Event-Driven Ansible Controller: Up and running: EDA Controller integrated with Automation Controller for job template launch. Integrated with Prometheus with Alertmanager source plugin.
• Event-Driven Ansible Technical Workshop: Walk through the basics of EDA (Event-Driven Ansible) covering fundamentals such as sources, rules, and actions and the corresponding technology and implementation through Ansible Rulebook CLI, rulebooks, source plugins, and EDA content collections.
• Event-driven-ansible repository on GitHub
• Kubernetes Meets Event-Driven Ansible: Ansible automation activities can be triggered based on events and actions occurring within a Kubernetes cluster.
• Creating custom Event-Driven Ansible source plugins: Developing event source plugins is pretty straightforward. For more information, check out the documentation on developing source plugins.
• EDA Ansible Automation Platform Demo: Provides everything to configure the needed resources to run the demo on AAP (credentials, templates, custom credentials for ServiceNow, activations, etc) along with the Decision Environment that is needed to run them or using podman, so it's ready-to-consume.
• Palo Alto EDA

Good Practices to write Ansible content

• Ansible 101 - Standards: By John Wadleigh.
• The Zen of Ansible: Based on Timothy Appnel's presentation at AnsibleFest 2022.
• Good Practices for Ansible: This document aims to gather good practices from the field of Ansible practitioners at Red Hat, consultants, developers, and others. And thus it strives to give any Red Hat employee, partner or customer (or any Ansible user) a guideline from which to start in good conditions their automation journey.
• Roles: Include vs Import

Inventory plugins

• Ansible Custom Inventory Plugin: A hands-on, quick start guide by Ajay Chenampara.
• Using inventory plugins
• AnsibleFest Presentation
• Write your own Red Hat Ansible Tower inventory plugin
• Developing an inventory plugin
• Ansible Constructed Inventory Plugin: by Pat Harrison.
• Advanced Inventories Workshop: by Goetz Rieger.

Inventory plugins examples

• Will Tome's examples: by Will Tome.
• JSON: My JSON inventory plugin demo.
• Active Directory: Active Directory dynamic inventory plugin for Ansible
• LDAP: Query active directory and get a list of machines to use as an inventory. Groups are auto generated off of OU structure and optionally group membership.

Lightspeed

• Getting started with Ansible Lightspeed Instruqt lab

Performance

• ansible-trace: Visualise where time is spent in your Ansible playbooks: what tasks, and what hosts, so you can find where to optimise and decrease playbook latency.
• 8 ways to speed up your Ansible playbooks: Integrate appropriate optimization techniques into your Ansible playbooks.
• 5 ways to make your Ansible modules work faster: When it comes to complex and lengthy workflows, you need to consider how to optimize the way you use modules so you can speed up your playbooks.
• Metrics endpoint: Available in the API: /api/v2/metrics/. It surfaces instantaneous metrics about the controller, which can be consumed by system monitoring software like the open source project Prometheus.
• Ansible SDK for Python: The Ansible SDK provides a lightweight Python library for dispatching and live-monitoring Ansible tasks, roles, and playbooks from the product or project.

Testing

• Developing and Testing Ansible Roles with Molecule and Podman - Part 1

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Installation

• Product trial: A single, 60-day, self-supported subscription to Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform for installation on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux is included with this product trial, if not already installed).
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform - Red Hat Developer: Download at no cost.
• System Requirements: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 or later 64-bit (x86), Python 3.8 or later, PostgreSQL version 13. 16 GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 40 GB dedicated hard disk space (allocate a minimum of 20 GB to /var/lib/awx for execution environment storage).
• Ansible Tower Capacity Determination and Job Impact: How much memory is available to the system (mem_capacity) and how much CPU is available to the system (cpu_capacity). mem_capacity is calculated relative to the amount of memory needed per fork. cpu_capacity algorithm looks at the amount of CPU resources is needed per fork.
• Installing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: This guide helps you to understand the installation requirements and processes behind installing Ansible Automation Platform 2.3.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Life Cycle
• What Ports Need To Be Opened In The Firewall For Ansible Automation Platform 2 Services?
• Deploying the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform operator on OpenShift Container Platform
• Upgrading an Existing Tower Installation
• Install Ansible Tower on OpenShift 4.x on your Laptop
• May I only update one of the components I want on Ansible Tower or Ansible Automation Controller?: No.
• How Do I Perform Security Patching / OS Package Upgrades On Ansible Tower/Automation Controller Nodes Without Breaking Any Ansible Tower/Automation Controller Functionality ?: To avoid upgrading Ansible Tower/Automation Controller outside of the Ansible Tower/Automation Controller setup playbook, you must exclude Ansible Tower/Automation Controller and its component packages from unrelated yum upgrades.

Ansible Automation Platform 2

• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Product Status Update: Blog post update from Feb 2021.
• Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 Early Access Homepage: Most commonly used resources for Ansible Automation Platform 2 with all information, FAQ, links, etc.
• Ansible Automation Platform 2.0 Release FAQ: Product features or roadmap items as it relates to the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2 Release.
• What’s New in Ansible Automation Controller 4.0: Why was Ansible Tower renamed to Automation controller?
• Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 to 2 Migration Guide: Methodology to migrate from Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 to Ansible Automation Platform 2.
• Migration from AAP 1.2 to Ansible Automation Platform 2: Side by side upgrade: Videos series with a step by step walkthrough of a side by side migration from AAP 1.2 to AAP 2 by Julen Landa Alustiza.

Subscription

• Certified Content: Beginning with Ansible 2.9, the Ansible Content Collection subsystem was included as fully supported by Red Hat, and the certified content should be using this packaging format and distributed via Ansible Automation Hub.
• What is included in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription?: Self-Hosted and/or on-premises components; Automation controller, Private automation hub, Automation content navigator, Automation execution environments, Execution environment builder, Automation mesh, Ansible content tools, and Ansible Content Collections. Hosted Services on console.redhat.com; Red Hat Insights for Ansible Automation Platform, Automation hub, Automation services catalog.

Business value

• Time Savings Calculator: Answer a few short questions to find out how much time you could save by using Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform across your organization.
• How to make the case for automation architecture: 5 ways to win investment: Having answers to the range of topics and questions discussed will help you be better equipped to embrace automation in your organization. If you can build a coalition of other Architects, explore these questions, and pitch to the right executive sponsor, you are well on your way to being the Automation Architect the team needs.
• Network automation: What architects need to know: Network automation is a marathon, so you might want to begin with baby steps. You also need clear business metrics and to understand how to measure them for success to help others see the path forward.
• 18 ways to differentiate open source products from upstream suppliers: Open source products must create enough differentiated value that customers will voluntarily pay for them versus another (or free) product.
• An IT executive's guide to automation: Learn the benefits of automation, how IT executives can ensure a successful rollout and adoption, and what to look for in an automation solution.
• Business value of Red Hat Ansible Automation

Platform configuration collections

• Controller Configuration
• Automation Hub Configuration

Validated content

• Ansible Validated Content Submission: Ansible Validated Content is a program dedicated to providing curated but non-supported content through AAP to help customers perform common operational tasks based on Red Hat or partner-led expertise.

AWX

• Stop using alpha software and improve upgrades

Upstream projects

• Ansible Core: a.k.a. Engine.
• AWX: Provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower.
• Ansible Navigator: A TUI for the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
• Ansible Runner: Tower-> Runner-> Core.
• Ansible Builder: Automates the process of building execution environments.
• Receptor: Overlay network intended to ease the distribution of work across a large and dispersed collection of workers.
• Galaxy NG: Host your very own Ansible Galaxy server.
• Automation Analytics Front End: Automation Analytics provides data analytics for AAP that provides visualization and insight into how automation is used in your organization.
• Pinakes: The upstream community project for RedHat's Automation Services Catalog product. 💀
  • Service Catalog API
  • Service Catalog UI
  • Drools: Rule engine (Decision Manager).
• Ansible Collections: Great Ansible content.
• Event Driven Ansible Controller: aka EDA-Controller.
• Backstage Plugin: Backstage as a Service Catalog replacement?

Architecture

• Deploying Ansible Automation Platform 2.1: Best practices to deploy Ansible Automation Platform 2.1. Reference architecture that provides an opinionated setup of deploying a highly available Ansible Automation Platform environment.
• Deploying Ansible Automation Platform 2 on Red Hat OpenShift: Provides the best practices to deploy Ansible Automation Platform 2 on Red Hat OpenShift.
• Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 - Reference Architecture
• Ansible Tower container-based cluster running on OpenShift: Ansible Tower supports container-based clusters running on OpenShift.
• Security Best Practices: Automation controller out-of-the-box is deployed in a secure fashion for use to automate typical environments. However, managing certain operating system environments, automation, and automation platforms, may require some additional best practices to ensure security.
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Hardening Guide: This guide can be used to harden the security posture of your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Backend Database

• Red Hat Ansible Tower Database Scope of Coverage
• Is Database Replication Supported with an Ansible Tower subscription?
• Certified Database Partner for Ansible Automation Platform: Easily automate the creation of high-availability Postgres with tooling built for Ansible. Orchestrate single or multi-datacenter deployments with a single command. Configure synchronous / asynchronous data replication replicated.
• Support CockroachDB as back end DB for Ansible Tower: Explores the feasibility of substituting CockroachDB for PostgreSQL 10 as the back end database for Ansible Tower installation.

Container Groups

• Container Groups docs
• Instance Groups: . Instance groups can be assigned to one or more of; Organizations, Inventories, and Job Templates.
• Ansible Tower Container Groups demo

Execution Environments

• The anatomy of automation execution environments: Automation execution environments are container images that act as Ansible runtimes for automation controller jobs. Ansible Automation Platform also includes a command-line tool called ansible-builder(execution environment builder)that lets you create automation execution environments by specifying Ansible Content Collections and Python dependencies.
• Introduction to Ansible Builder: Ansible Builder is a tool that aids in the creation of Ansible Execution Environments.
• When localhost isn't what it seems in Red Hat AAP 2: Now with Ansible Automation Platform 2, localhost means you’re running inside a container, which is ephemeral in nature. This means we must do things differently to achieve the same goal. For persisten storage you can run some form of shared storage solution, like Amazon S3, maybe Gist, or even just have a role to rsync data to your data endpoint. As a last resort, you can use automation controller’s isolated jobs paths to mount directories and files into an execution environment at runtime.

High Availability

• Disaster Recovery for the Ansible Automation Platform: DR and High Availability (“HA”) are not currently supported. Current Ansible Automation Platform customers are needing to configure their DR instances to accurately reflect their node usage and need guidance based on changes due to manifest files. This can be for cold, warm, or hot DR/HA.
• Configure High Availability and/or Disaster Recovery on a Tower Cluster: Toolkit not officially supported by Red Hat Ansible support/engineering and provided as is.
• AWX Clustering/HA Overview: Allow grouping of clustered instances into different pools/queues.
• Manage automation controller active and passive multisite architecture with Ansible: Create a workflow to achieve consistency across multiple Ansible Automation Platform sites simultaneously. Remove the overhead associated with maintaining database backups or expensive replication solutions while enabling disaster recovery and failover.
• Clustering: Clustering is sharing load between hosts. Each instance should be able to act as an entry point for UI and API access. This should enable Tower administrators to use load balancers in front of as many instances as they wish and maintain good data visibility.
• AWS Multi–AZ Ansible Tower Cluster

Platform as Code

• Automation controller workflow deployment as code: A programmatic way to create, update or delete automation controller objects as well as perform tasks such as run jobs, change configurations and much more.
• Creating an Ansible controller config as code pipeline: Create an organization-wide solution to deploying configuration as code.
• Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 Configuration as Code Improvements: What Configuration as Code (CaC) is and the benefits it can bring to your organization, including a UI and API walkthrough of automation controller and how to take a full Configuration as Code approach to your automation infrastructure.
• Manage automation controller Configuration as Code (CaC) with Ansible: An alternative to database replication to copy data from one environment to another.

Considerations

• Supported Platforms with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Platform Support Matrix for control nodes (the nodes that Ansible Engine is installed on) as well as the managed nodes (the nodes that Ansible Engine are connecting to and automating).
• How are "managed nodes" defined as part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offering?

AAP in the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP)

• Ansible on Clouds Product Features: Ansible Automation Platform offered through cloud marketplaces is the same product as self-installed Ansible Automation Platform. Due to differences in infrastructure or deployment model, there are some feature support in Ansible Automation Platform from cloud marketplaces that is still in development. Any feature not mentioned in this article should function the same regardless of deployment type.
• Microsoft Azure (managed)
  • Ansible on Azure Articles
  • Ansible on Azure Backup and Restore: Ansible on Azure performs daily backups for data stored by the platform. These backups are used to provide a contingency against catastrophic failure of Azure resources to allow Red Hat’s SRE team to restore the platform to a running state.
• AWS Marketplace (self-managed)
• Google Cloud Marketplace (self-managed)

RBAC and Authentication

• Summary of Authentication Methods For Red Hat Ansible Tower
• Setting up Enterprise Authentication
• RBAC Guide and Recommendations
• Organizations: Logical collection of Users, Teams, Projects, and Inventories.

LDAP

• Authenticating To Ansible Tower via Windows Active Directory
• Setting up LDAP Authentication

SAML

• Using two-factor SAML with Ansible Tower: 2FA to Ansible Tower with SAML, OAuth, and even some LDAP configs is fine. On the other hand, 2FA to managed machines is discouraged.
• Mapping SAML attributes to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform organizations and teams
• How To Configure SAML Authentication with Azure AD in Ansible Tower?
• Configure SAML Authentication: AWX can be configured to talk with SAML in order to authenticate (create/login/logout) users of AWX. User Team and Organization membership can be embedded in the SAML response to AWX.

Internals

• Ansible Tower 3.7.0 RabbitMQ Replacement
• Ansible Runner Integration Overview: AWX calls out to ansible-runner to invoke ansible and ansible-playbook.
• AWX Capacity Determination and Job Impact: The AWX capacity system determines how many jobs can run on an Instance given the amount of resources available to the Instance and the size of the jobs that are running (referred to hereafter as Impact).

Python

• Python and Ansible to Automate a Network Security Workflow

Go

• Get Yourself GOing with Ansible

Network Automation

• Ansible Network Automation: Red Hat Ansible Network Automation main page.
• Red Hat's Network Automation guide: Goes from assessing your network automation maturity to top network automation use cases.
• Network MOP's as automated workflows: A good way to translate network automation into business value is by taking existing processes and automating them to make them more consistent and faster to run.
• Network automation: What architects need to know: Network automation is a marathon, so you might want to begin with baby steps. You also need clear business metrics and to understand how to measure them for success to help others see the path forward.
• Five great use cases for Ansible Network Automation: Presented by Sean Cavanaugh, Technical Marketing Manager at Red Hat.
• Network automation instructional e-book: Technical guide to implementing common network automation tasks with Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform.
• Using network automation to power modern applications: Mike Fratto at 451 Research explores how network automation differs from automated network management and which features to consider as you mature your network automation solution.
• Network automation for everyone
• Financial services network automation
• Enterprise network automation for 2020 and beyond
• How Do You Start Your Network Automation Adoption Journey?: One of the best ways for people to begin managing their network in a practical way by Landon Holley.
• Infrastructure Awareness - Technical Demo: Retrieve facts from network devices and build dynamic documentation to help network engineers and architects gather automated information about their network. By Sean Cavanaugh.
• Using New Ansible Utilities for Operational State Management and Remediation: Comparing the current operational state of your IT infrastructure to your desired state.
• Ansible Network: Workshop - Network Tool Kit: By Sean Cavanaugh.
• Ansible Network Roadmap: By Trishna Guha.
• Ansible Network: Project Board: Ansible Networking Collection Project Board.
• What networking platforms and versions are tested as part of Red Hat Ansible Network Automation?

Working with Network Configurations

• Automating Network Device Configuration Parsing with Ansible: Tips and Tricks for Network Engineers: Convert network device configurations into an automation-friendly format. Ansible also provides various options for parsing configurations, including using network resource modules, NTC templates, and Ansible’s native parser.
• Ansible Network Backup: Role that provides a single platform-agnostic entry management for network backup.
• Network Tool Kit: Collection of network roles used for the Ansible Network Automation Workshop.
• Parsing semi-structured text with Ansible: Documentation of the cli_parse module that parses semi-structured data such as network configurations into structured data to allow programmatic use of the data from that device.
• Ansible Module for utilizing Hierarchical Configuration: Hierarchical Configuration takes a running configuration of a network device, compares it to its intended configuration, and builds the remediation steps necessary to bring a device into spec with its intended configuration.
• Fix Your Interface Description with Ansible and CDP/LLDP: Fetch all discovered neighbors per device and set the interface description according to the remote host and port. It supports Cisco IOS XE and NX-OS.
• Jinja2 Template Designer for Automation: To test online your jinja2 template.

Network Inventory

• Network Inventory Report with Ansible: Creates a compliance report for network devices. By Adam Mack.
• Example of Networking Inventory with Ansible: Generate a HTML report using the template module from facts gathered with the nxos_facts module. By Sean Cavanaugh.
• Git as a source of truth for network automation
• Ansible SNMP Collection: Using SNMP on the control node to make SNMP connections to a device.

Network Resource Modules

• What is a resource module
• Network Resource Modules: From Ansible docs.
• Network Features Coming Soon in Ansible Engine 2.9: Facts enhancements and resource modules with scope of work.
• Ansible Network Resource Modules Quick Reference
• Network Resource Module Models
• Ansible Network Automation Feature Tracker: Resource modules per vendor as November 2020.
• Network:2021 Spring Roadmap: Latest network resource modules.
• Deep dive on VLANS resource modules for network automation
• Getting Started With OSPFV2 Resource Modules
• Deep Dive: ACL Configuration Management Using Ansible Network Automation Resource Modules
• Ansible Network Resource Modules: Deep Dive on Return Values
• Ansible Network Resource Purge parameter

Arista

• Ansible Network Automation with Arista CloudVision and Arista Validated Designs: Live Demo of Network services provisioning and workflow with Ansible and CloudVision and deep-dive into the “stackable template architecture” by Brad Thornton.
• Ansible Collection For Arista Validated Designs
• Ansible Modules for Arista CloudVision Platform
• Addressing NetOps issues with Event-Driven Ansible: Respond to events we gather from things like network telemetry.
• gNMI and NATS Demo.

Aruba

• Aruba Switching for Data Center Networking (DCN)

Cisco

• Simplifying network automation with Red Hat Ansible and Cisco: Simplify, optimize, and automate network operations. Automation gives you the agility, flexibility, and consistency you need to keep infrastructure running at peal performance.
• Cisco with Ansible: DevNet tutorials to start your automation journey with Ansible.
• Manage your Cisco devices with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Drive the desired state of configuration for VLANs, prefix-lists, interfaces, BGP and more!
• Cisco OSPF Configuration with Ansible: The primary focus is on configuring OSPF, but the Ansible playbook also takes care of configuring the interfaces and IP addresses with resource modules.

ACI

• Cisco ACI Guide: Ansible ACI module documentation to provide a user-friendly interface to managing your ACI environment using Ansible playbooks.
• Introduction to ACI and Ansible labs: Explore how you can now manage your ACI using Ansible for "ACI as Code" and integrate into your DevOps practices.
• Intel embraces SDN to modernize its chip factories: Intel has deployed SDN in roughly 15% of its factories to date and will continue to migrate existing Ethernet-based factories to SDN. For new implementations, Intel has chosen to use open source Ansible playbooks and scripts from GitHub to accelerate its move to SDN.
• What’s new and exciting on Cisco ACI with Red Hat Ansible Collections: There are over 100 ACI and Multisite modules in Ansible core. Modules for specific objects like, Tenant and Application Profiles as well as a module for interacting directly with the ACI REST API. This means that a broad set of ACI functionality is available in Ansible, to cover a broad set of Data center use cases.
• Secure Service Provisioning with Ansible Automation Platform, vCenter, HashiCorp Vault, and Cisco ASA/ACI: Demo integrating Ansible Tower, VMware, HashiCorp Vault, and Cisco ACI/ASA. A single Ansible playbook that does the work of the VM admin, O/S admin, network admin, and the security/firewall team.
• Automating ACI with Ansible): Cisco Live slides for session BRKACI-1619.
• Ansible recipes for ACI: A series of Ansible playbooks you can use with Cisco ACI. They are kept as simple as possible to make them easy to understand and reuse in your environment.
• Controlling Cisco ACI with Ansible
• Automate Cisco ACI Tenant Profile Creation: Parse a CSV file that includes the needed attributes to automate and orchestrate creation of new tenants.

ASA

• Parsing a Cisco ASA config file: Three options to parse data from an unstructured config file.
• Creating ACL entries in a Cisco ASA device: The Cisco ASA collection provides modules and plugins to automate Cisco ASA operations. In this section, you will learn how to use Cisco ASA modules to create ACL entries in a Cisco ASA device.
• Automating the deployment os the Cisco ASA REST API: deploying the Cisco ASA REST API using automation via Ansible.
• Ansible Playbook for Cisco ASAv Firewall Topology: Configure specific firewall settings.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CallManager)

• Cisco Administrative XML (AXL) examples: These samples demonstrates how to use Ansible playbooks to read/update CUCM configurations via the AXL SOAP API and CUCM CLI/SSH.

IOS

• Ansible Network Automation - Config Backup and Restore: Configuration backup and restore for a Cisco IOS-XE network router demo by Sean Cavanaugh.
• Network CVE Report with Ansible: Creates a report of all CVEs that affect a specific platform (Cisco NXOS, IOS, IOS-XE) based on the version of the software the hosts are running. By Adam Mack.

Software upgrade

• Cisco IOS XE Catalyst 9000 Switches Upgrade using Ansible: Steps to upgrade your Cisco IOS XE Catalyst 9000 switches smoothly and effectively, whether you are new to Ansible or already familiar with it.
• Upgrading 71 Cisco Switches unattended using Ansible: upgrade of 71 stacked Cisco 2960XR switches.
• How to perform IOS upgrade on Cisco Switch using Ansible: Example using a Cisco 2960 switch (WS-C2960-24TT-L).
• Ansible Playbook for Network OS Upgrade with pre and post checks: Upgrade process can also be customized to include any tasks that you want, e.g. taking pre-checks, post-checks and then comparing them and highlighting the differences, etc.

Meraki

• An official Ansible collection for Meraki Dashboard AP: The initial version of the new official Ansible collection is backward-compatible with the previous community-supported Ansible collection. Using the old modules of the collection will generate deprecation messages on the console.
• Meraki playbook example: Queries data from the Merakin innstance in the DevNet Sandbox.

SD-WAN (Viptela)

• Viptela Ansible Modules: An set of Ansible modules for automating a Viptela Overlay Network.
• SDWAN DevOps: This repo contains a set of tools to automate workflows and build CI/CD pipelines for Cisco SDWAN.

F5

• Deploy production grade automation technology at scale with Red Hat and F5: F5 provides Certified Content Collections for both physical and virtual editions of BIG-IP, allowing you to automate networks of any size more simply. You can automate and orchestrate nearly all Day 0 to Day 2 tasks over a wide range of use cases. A dedicated staff builds and regularly maintains these integrations, ensuring that they are always up to date and reliable for production use.
• Ansible F5 Networking Workshop

Juniper

• Understanding the Ansible for Junos OS Collections, Roles, and Modules

NetBox

• Using NetBox for Ansible Source of Truth
• Get IP address from NetBox
• NetBox lookup
• NetBox Ansible Collection: Inventory: Starting out with the basics of the plugin and getting some sample output and show how to form groups.

Palo Alto

• Palo Alto Networks firewall automation with AAP: Instruqt lab.
• Palo Alto Ansible LIVEcommunity
• Module reference
• Palo Alto Networks playbook examples
• Michael Ford's examples

Edge

• Red Hat Device Edge Workshop: Focuses on deploying various workloads to a Device Edge endpoint, focusing on ease of updating the image to support the workload type and leveraging automation to deploy the workload.
• Ansible Edge GitOps: Explores some of the possibilities of using an OpenShift-based Ansible Automated Platform deployment and managing Edge devices, based on work done with a partner in the Chemical space. This pattern uses OpenShift Virtualization (the productization of Kubevirt) to simulate the Edge environment for VMs.
• How to automate devices using the Ansible CIP collection: Control embedded devices via the Common Industrial Protocol (CIP).

Kubernetes

• How useful is Ansible in a Cloud-Native Kubernetes Environment?

Security

• Simplify your security operations center
• Security Automation with Ansible
• Deploying OpenSCAP on Satellite using Ansible
• Ansible for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Security Automation: 90-minute workshop with day-to-day security operations hands-on exercises by Raed Soliman.
• Implementing Proactive Security and Compliance Automation and DevSecOps
• Workshop - Ansible Automation for Security Compliance
• ansible-hardening
• Ansible Lockdown
• STIG content for configuration management tools
• Ansible + OpenSCAP For Compliance Automation
• Enterprise Compliance and Security with Ansible (Ansible Automates)
• Automating Security Compliance with Ansible: DevSecOps made Easy
• ComplianceAsCode: Ansible playbooks generated from security profiles.

RHEL

• Implementing Content for Automated Security Compliance to Custom Policies (Workshop)
• PCI-DSS v3.2.1 Control Baseline for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8: Ensures PCI-DSS v3.2.1 security configuration settings are applied.
• CIS Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Benchmark for Level 2 - Server: This profile defines a baseline that aligns to the "Level 2 - Server" configuration from the Center for Internet Security® Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Benchmark™, v1.0.1, released 2021-05-19.
• DISA STIG for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7: This profile contains configuration checks that align to the DISA STIG for Red Hat Enterprise Linux V3R4.
• Red Hat Product Applicability Guide for PCI DSS version 3.2

Windows

• Windows Ansible Examples: Playbook collection by Orcun Atakan.

Integrations

Service Now

• Introducing the Ansible API for ServiceNow ITSM: A result of the release of Rome, but it's also compatible with ServiceNow ITSM San Diego and Tokyo.
• Automating ServiceNow with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
• Opening and Closing Tickets
• Ansible + ServiceNow Demos: These demos are intended for effectively demonstrating Ansible + ServiceNow capabilities with prescriptive guides on the Ansible Automation Workshop infrastructure.
• Parsing facts from network devices using PyATS/Genie
• Making outbound RESTful API calls to Red Hat Ansible Tower
• Connecting ServiceNow and Ansible Tower
• Governing Self-Service Cloud Provisioning
• Ansible Service Now example: My workflow example with SNOW that parses data from a Cisco IOS device to create and update an incident.
• Instruqt lab
• Get started with ServiceNow automation (lab): The ServiceNow integration for Ansible Automation Platform is made possible through a certified content collection called servicenow.itsm. This collection is made available on Automation Hub on console.redhat.com. The environment that is being created for you includes this collection in an execution environment that allows Ansible Automation Platform to execute tasks against a ServiceNow instance

Splunk

• Centralize your Automation Logs with Ansible Tower and Splunk Enterprise
• Splunk-Ansible documentation: Collection of Splunk configuration best practices, written as Ansible playbooks for configuring Splunk Enterprise and Universal Forwarder instances based on a declarative configuration. The playbooks are internally-vetted procedures and operations that administer and manage Splunk as done within the company.

Terraform

• Ansible vs. Terraform Demystified: The two tools are better together and can work in harmony to create a better experience for developers and operations teams. By Sean Cavanaugh.
• Providing Terraform with that Ansible Magic: With the Ansible provider for Terraform, we are able to define the use of an Ansible inventory in the main.tf file and once the project is initialized and built by Terraform, we can gather Terraform resource information from the state file and push it into an inventory.
• Ansible and HashiCorp: Better Together: Presenters from Red Hat and HashiCorp showcase workflows that integrate the best parts of Ansible and the HashiCorp stack for configuration and provisioning.
• Ansible & Terraform – together or against?: Treat Terraform like any other Ansible module to deploy resources and get the benefit of Terraform like state, dynamic changes to the deployment and even “terraform destroy”. By Götz Rieger.
• DigitalOcean's How To Use Ansible with Terraform for Configuration Management: Terraform and Ansible together form a flexible workflow for spinning up servers with the needed software and hardware configurations. Running Ansible directly as part of the Terraform deployment process allows you to have the servers up and bootstrapped with dependencies for your development work and applications much faster.
• Red Hat and Hashicorp Demo Event: By Michael Ford and Andy James.

Puppet

• Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to Ansible Tower

Projects

CMDB

• Ansible Configuration Management Database: Ansible-cmdb takes the output of Ansible's fact gathering and converts it into a static HTML overview page (and other things) containing system configuration information.
• AnsibleDB: Gives you the ability to quickly collect facts about your Infrastucture estate [linux, windows & network devices] and via our API, pull out the information important to you.

GUI

• Ansible Semaphore: Modern UI for Ansible written in Go.

My Ansible Content

Roles

• grafana_agent: Installs Grafana Cloud Agent on RedHat/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu servers to collect observability data and sends it to Grafana Cloud.

Collections

• capirca_acl: This collection includes a module (translate) to use Capirca from your Ansible playbooks.

Playbooks

• ansible-kubernetes: Deploy managed Kubernetes clusters in the cloud: AKS, EKS and GKE.
• ansible-web-server: Create a highly available web application on any cloud provider with Ansible.
• ansible-webserver-azure: Automatically provision a number webserver instances behind a load balancer on Azure.
• ansible-networking: Simple networking examples.
• ansible-net-modules: Network Resource Modules Demo.
• aws-testbed: Create reproducible Linux environments in the cloud.
• ansible-cloud: Deploy virtual machines in AWS (Fedora, JunOS, Cisco IOS, CentOS, etc.).
• ansible-snow: Ansible Tower workflow with Cisco and Service Now Collections.
• ansible-backup: Creates a backup of your Tower setup and uploads it to AWS S3.
• ansible-home: Collection of playbooks I run in my personal home-lab.
• ansible-rhpds: Request a Red Hat Product Demo System (RHPDS) Sandbox.
• ansible-workflow: An attempt to document Ansible Tower workflows as code.
• check-calendar: Simple app to verify whether a time slot is taken/busy in Google Calendar from Ansible.

GitHub Actions

• ansible-lint-action: My personal fork to be able to install Ansible collections and any other improvements that might be required.

Execution Environments

• Build Execution Environments with GitHub Actions

Inventories

• JSON inventory plugin demo: My JSON inventory plugin demo.
• ansible-inventory: DevNet always-on Cisco devices.

Blog Posts

• Automating Azure Infrastructure for High Availability Web Hosting with Ansible
• Automating Network Device Configuration Parsing with Ansible: Tips and Tricks for Network Engineers
• A simple approach to delete AWS resources with Ansible
• A beginner's guide to auto-configure a Linux machine with Ansible
• A simple guide to quickly provisioning AWS resources with Ansible
• How to consistently run temporary workloads on AWS and save money
• Mapping SAML attributes to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform organizations and teams
• 5 ways to process JSON data in Ansible
• Monitoring your home lab devices in the cloud for free
• Create an Ansible module for integrating your Google Calendar
• Integrate your calendar with Ansible to avoid schedule conflicts
• How to make the case for automation architecture: 5 ways to win investment
• Get Yourself GOing with Ansible
• Ansible and Google Calendar Integration for Change Management
• Python and Ansible to automate a Network Security workflow