so let's get started with the
introduction why the ansible automation
platform and what can it do
so i always like to start with a story
so obviously i can read the slide
automation happens when one person meets
a problem they never want to solve again
i think the comic is always showing like
give a lazy man a problem and they'll
find the most ingenious way to solve it
and i think most people who get involved
in automation like to
think of themselves as kind of clever
that they're getting rid of tasks they
don't want to do anyway and i think they
all have their own story mine is if we
we go back to the past
to when i was probably i don't know
between 12 and 15. my parents forced me
to learn the trombone and do band
and i had to practice said trombone
every day for an hour to two hours i i
don't even remember i remember i did not
like doing that
so one afternoon i recorded myself
practicing the trombone
into a nice microphone that i must have
had
i recorded scales i recorded songs i
recorded some jazz songs like all the
different things that they would hear
practicing then i fed this back into win
amp i put it on shuffle mode and then i
would play video games with the
earphones on and they would hear this
out an amp of me practicing the trombone
so might not be the best example but i
cleverly got out of practicing trombone
i think for two or three weeks before i
got caught and in trouble but automation
is happening to allow more free time for
folks and i think automation sometimes
can be really clever
to solve problems but it's becoming
imperative for businesses to solve these
problems because we don't have time well
my example is a bit funny and a little
bit more humor i think we can take the
same idea of taking tasks that are
boring repetitive that don't need to
have an architect assigned to them and
apply it to any silo across an
organization
so these kind of silos exist because of
how much time we're wasting in each of
these individual things
and the other way i kind of look at it
is a lot of people don't care about a
network engineer and like my
background's a network engineer they
don't care about a system administrator
they don't care about a security
engineer what they care about is the
business outcome of an application
and the way i kind of talk to this is
like my wife is very technical she's a
very smart person she uses tech she's in
the medical field
but she doesn't care what server or what
engineer what's happening for her
instagram account she just wants the
pictures to load
and we need to start thinking of i.t
infrastructure as business outcomes and
not focused on maybe the specific thing
and automation allows us to start
measuring the success of this and make
getting out of these domain specific
tools and start focusing on
orchestration automation for our entire
organization
so why the answer automation platform
obviously there's a lot of different
orchestration
automation tools out there there's
different devops tools and we think we
are very powerful
we have a lot of different use cases
that we cover everything from network
security systems containers public cloud
private cloud cloud native but we're
simple
and we're
very simple to the point that that's why
you've heard of ansible that's probably
why you're in this class is we're
becoming the de facto standard of
automation which lowers opex for
everyone because it makes it really easy
for someone to learn and get started and
then trust automation then finally we're
agent list which i think kind of
circles back to the other two points
and what this means is there's no
software installed on what we're
automating and this means ansible is
uniquely positioned to work really well
in environments where there's just an
api
like a public cloud or a itsm tool like
servicenow
or
talking to a device that's more like an
appliance like a cisco switch or a
netapp device or storage device because
they don't necessarily have permissions
for us to install python or powershell
or equivalent code and execute it from
that device we need to be agentless
meaning that we are going to execute on
the control node and then we use the
connection method that we
need to talk to that device whether it's
api a command line
whatever
so
there's a ton of different use cases for
ansible automation platform or ansible
in general
is you can see some sort of use case on
the bottom here right so we have use
cases on infrastructure and that can be
firewall servers load balancers clouds
applications storage containers network
devices
virtualization platforms
that could be vmware that could be rev
that could be anything
and what we like to do is say like
we really want people to think of
ansible more than just config management
and that's i think the main takeaway
from this slide is that anything that
you can do a human can do but we can
automate in some capacity and you're
kind of looking more for that overall
story like what is the business outcome
what do we want to automate we can help
you get there with ansible automation
platform
and again circling back to that silos
kind of problem that we outlined
um imagine
one of these these silos is i don't want
to do music i want to automate music
practice now i wish i could upload skill
set into my brain but in a real
organization we have we have all these
different silos and silos are needed i'm
not saying there's not a need for
specialists or people that are a
background of a network engineer or
they're a systems engineer or they're a
system administrator or they're an sre
we need those specialties we just need
to scale them out by automating stuff
that they know how to do we can't call
the same guy that hero
that uh
of that organization over and over
because you can burn these people out so
this is a way to scale out people and
create consistent governance between all
these different groups so imagine on the
edge team if there's a
a use case where we're always doing the
same thing that could be an automation
script you let other teams run on your
infrastructure and then you kind of
create guardrails on it and we'll circle
back to that later in this presentation
in talking about what that means and how
that's implemented with ansible
automation platform
so what is in the red hat ansible
automation platform so there's ansible
automation components
including automation controller we'll
dive into
there's hosted cloud services so these
are on console.redhat.com which includes
services catalog it includes automation
hub which is kind of like an app store
for content and includes
automation analytics which is now called
red hat insights for ansible automation
platform
and finally the content itself is part
of the ansible automation platform so
content is stored in what we call a
collection which we'll do a deep dive in
and collections can contain modules they
can contain
roles which are pre-baked playbooks that
are reusable so this now allows
different teams or vendors that you know
and love to share automation with you so
it's kind of pre-canned we're like hey
i'm probably not the first person to
automate changing the message of the day
on my linux server so you can just take
this role reuse it in a collection and
off to the horse race as you go
so when we look at this kind of from a
top down view and want to see all the
different components on the left of this
diagram we have the different
users and i think a lot of these are
involving and it's not necessarily due
to ansible automation platform involving
the type of users but ansible or
automation in general is changing
organization's culture so you have this
idea of operators domain experts users
content creators and these can be even
subdomained out right we have a network
domain expert a security domain expert
and a
application
expert
right and they're going to use different
content domains so we kind of divided up
our content domains which is that middle
section here into four major categories
infrastructure which to us for this
purpose of this diagram means linux
servers in windows servers
cloud which means public cloud private
cloud and container native
or cloud native or how we implement with
kubernetes and openshift
network which is automating network
switches and routers from like cisco
arista and juniper and finally security
which is firewalls
from again the same vendors but it also
includes things like checkpoint
it includes integration with uh
a multitude of different tools including
ibm qradar
and sniffing packets and kind of
implementing this into like an entire
use case for
not just
automating security devices but
automating where they fit into the
ecosystem
and on top we have controller which is
the web ui we'll do a deep dive on
automation hub which has a hosted part
and private automation hub which is
hosted on premises
and that is a content repository for
your content we have automation services
catalog
that i talked to about before this is
kind of like a lightweight itsm tool so
it allows you to do some ordering of it
and we kind of see the use case for
consumers within your organization that
aren't engineers so imagine like i'm
being onboarded i want to order a laptop
and get my desk configured they could
just press a button and it takes care of
the approvals and everything behind the
scenes and finally insights for ansible
that allows some analytics and it's how
we measure successive automation across
our enterprise
and then finally on the bottom we have
ansible core which i'll kind of
elaborate on a little bit
so
we always say don't take my word for it
obviously i'm going to be biased i love
ansible automation i think it's awesome
i left my previous company to come work
on ansible automation and that's why we
kind of lean on the analysts in our
slide decks and kind of show what what
they're showing so in this case the
forester wave has showed us as a leader
multiple years in a row now
we've seen the highest possible score so
i never say don't take sean's word for
it but you can take forester's word for
it and you can see that we showed up
very strong
and we competed with a lot of huge
companies out there and you've probably
heard of almost all of these companies
so hopefully that provides a good
overview of ansible and now we're going
to do a deep dive in the next section
starting with ansible core
[Music]
you