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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

December 9, 2025•
Resource type: Datasheet
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Overview

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is an enterprise IT automation solution that includes everything needed to build, deploy, and manage end-to-end automation at scale. Built on a powerful framework, Ansible Automation Platform is engineered to help organizations create, manage, and scale their automation workloads everywhere. It offers a flexible, stable, and security-focused foundation for deploying automation across datacenters, hybrid cloud, and the network edge. With Ansible Automation Platform, customers can improve their return on investment (ROI), resilience, and compliance with a solution that unifies and empowers IT teams.

No matter where you are in your enterprise automation journey, Ansible Automation Platform helps you:

  • Deliver more efficient and resilient IT operations. Codify your IT infrastructure and processes and deploy automation consistently across teams to improve collaboration and innovation. Gen AI-powered features help streamline onboarding, management, and troubleshooting, while detailed analytics help you measure and optimize your automation and improve decision making.
  • Orchestrate workflows across your entire infrastructure. Integrate automation with existing systems and IT investments to deliver greater cost efficiency and ROI. Build workflows to simplify complex processes while reducing bottlenecks between teams. Use prebuilt certified content collections to help you consistently deploy and manage the entire lifecycle of your network, operating systems (OSs), virtualized environments, ITSM, security systems, and more.
  • Turn intelligence into action. Use event-driven automation to proactively respond to and remediate issues, reducing human intervention while enforcing policies and ensuring compliance. Implement AIOps workflows that integrate with observability, ITSM, and other systems to perform root cause analysis and guide decision making.  

Business value of Ansible Automation Platform1

668% three-year ROI

8 months to payback investment

61% reduced unplanned downtime

68% faster to deploy compute

67% faster to deploy network resources

Features and benefits

Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations adopt a culture of collaborative automation by delivering a consistent experience using features tailored to the needs of the entire IT team. With Ansible Automation Platform:

  • Developers retain the freedom to build playbooks and roles, without the operational overhead of maintaining disparate tools and frameworks. Execution environments deliver a consistent container-like experience for building and scaling automation, with new tooling included to help build and manage them. Ansible Content Collections offer prebuilt automation content from more than 80 certified partners, with solutions available for nearly every use case. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed coding assistant improves developer productivity and closes the skills gaps for new users.
  • Administrators and IT operators have powerful tools with automation controller and Ansible automation hub to manage and share automation projects more efficiently, all while maintaining control. Align teams around a unified and consistent experience for every use case. Build IT workflows that bring together disparate systems to remove process bottlenecks.
  • IT managers and architects can more easily expand automation across the enterprise with user-friendly features designed to accelerate onboarding, improve efficiency, and prove the business impact of automation. Scale automation everywhere at speed while controlling what automation can do at key points in the automation execution process. 

Ansible Automation Platform overview

Feature

Uses and benefits

Create

Ansible Content Collections

Ansible Content Collections help Ansible content creators and developers get automation up and running in less time. Backed by Red Hat and an extensive partner ecosystem, Ansible Content Collections provide users with trusted, flexible automation content building blocks that can be used across a wide variety of use cases. 

Ansible validated content makes certain that IT teams follow a prescribed approach for managing their operations to optimize consistency, security, and performance. Ansible validated content is also customizable for each organizations' specific deployment. 

Ansible development tools

 

Ansible development tools are an integrated and supported suite of capabilities that help automation engineers at any skill level accurately create automation content faster than with manual coding. Build, test, analyze, and deploy Ansible modules and Ansible Playbooks without requiring hard coding skills using automation-specific tooling.

Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant

The coding assistant for Ansible Lightspeed helps automation engineers and developers generate Ansible code for single automation tasks, multiple tasks, or entire playbooks and roles in less time. Using natural language prompts, users can quickly generate trusted, reliable code using the IBM watsonx Code Assistant large language model (LLM), trained on Ansible-specific datasets. Create Ansible content faster and more accurately with reliable, trusted code recommendations—served directly in your code editing environment via the Ansible VS Code extension.

Automation execution environments

Packaged as containers, automation execution environments are defined, consistent, and portable environments for executing Ansible Playbooks and Roles. Execution environments offer a simple, flexible way to build, reuse, and scale automation content.

Manage

Ansible automation hub

Ansible automation hub provides a place for Ansible Automation Platform customers to find, use, and share Red Hat-supported technology and its partners in less time, providing confidence for the most critical environments. The private automation hub is the on-premise deployment of Ansible automation hub, providing customers a container image repository for their execution environments.

Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub

Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub provides a custom portal experience built for Ansible Automation Platform. It helps organizations enhance developer productivity and speed up automation adoption with guided learning paths, interactive labs, and integrated development tools. 

With Ansible plug-ins for Red Hat Developer Hub, organizations can automate their community of practice (CoP) and support both new and experienced automation developers. The integrated tooling includes connections to Ansible Lightspeed, private automation hub, and the Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces integrated development environment (IDE).

Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant

Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant uses gen AI to help simplify the administration and management of Ansible Automation Platform. Using a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipeline connected to Red Hat documentation and other resources, the intelligent assistant also provides referenced links to additional documentation and resources to help administrators and operators explore topics in more detail.

Automation analytics and automation dashboard

Automation analytics is a suite of dashboards to help IT leaders and automation architects observe how teams are adopting automation and track the success of those efforts. It measures automation ROI and can predict the time and cost savings of future projects to help plan and scale more efficiently. Operations teams can track the status of automation deployments across multiple clusters, making it easier to manage job templates, tasks, and modules.

Automation controller

The control plane for Ansible Automation Platform, automation controller includes a user interface (UI), role-based access control (RBAC), workflows, and CI/CD features for helping your team scale. Automation controller helps standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited. Manage inventory and automation jobs, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate into reporting, all from a centralized user interface and RESTful application programming interface (API).

Event-Driven Ansible

Event-Driven Ansible helps IT teams respond to changing IT conditions automatically, providing consistent and repeatable responses. Integrated with observability and monitoring tool alerts, user-designed conditional rulebooks can take specific, immediate actions. It creates automated end-to-end processes to handle routine low-level tasks, such as certificate rotation or fact gathering to support a service ticket.

Red Hat Lightspeed for automation

Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights) for automation gives you full visibility into the Ansible Automation Platform infrastructure running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux® or Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform. Using actionable, predictive insights, administrators and operations teams can proactively identify and resolve operational issues before they affect automation performance, which improves the resilience and efficiency of the automation infrastructure.

Scale

Automation mesh

Automation mesh allows enterprises to scale automation of large inventories across diverse network topologies, platforms, and teams. Automation mesh facilitates resilience and fault tolerance while enhancing security capabilities to standardize and normalize automation across your entire IT estate. The topology viewer feature allows users to graphically visualize even the most complex automation topologies, including hop, execution, hybrid, and control nodes—all across multiple sites.

Self-service automation portal

The self-service automation portal extends automation to a broader set of enterprise users. Using a simplified, point-and-click interface, organizations can make automation available on demand to streamline processes while maintaining control and governance. The portal integrates your existing Ansible Automation Platform setup and guides users through automation requests with step-by-step smart forms to launch pre-approved automation jobs.

Deployment options

Whether your hybrid cloud takes an infrastructure-first approach (i.e., public cloud attached to your private cloud), multiple public clouds, some combination of bare-metal, virtual, and cloud environments, or as a hosted cloud-native application, Ansible Automation Platform can help you manage, coordinate, and operationalize your deployments under a single set of processes and policies.

You can deploy Ansible Automation Platform on premise or through the following cloud providers:

Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console

Ansible Automation Platform also brings together the best of on-premise automation innovation while including hosted services that can be accessed alongside other Red Hat Cloud Services on the Hybrid Cloud Console. Discover Ansible Content Collections through automation hub and access Red Hat Lightspeed to get insights into your automation infrastructure running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift. 

Comprehensive IT ecosystem support

Ansible Automation Platform supports a variety of native and third-party platforms to help you integrate automation into your existing IT investments, wherever you are in your automation journey. Some certified integration partners include: 

  • AI and AIOps: Red Hat AI, IBM Instana, Splunk, Dynatrace, LogicMonitor, Big Panda
  • Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform
  • Operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft Windows Server 
  • Network: Arista, Juniper, Cisco, Cisco Meraki, F5, HPE Aruba Networking, Infoblox, Palo Alto, NetBox Labs, and more
  • Virtualization: AWS, Cohesity, Dell, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp, PureStorage, VMware
  • Security: Cisco ASA, CyberArk, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Splunk
  • IT Service Management: ServiceNow

Learn more

For more information, visit redhat.com/ansible

  1. IDC Snapshot, sponsored by Red Hat. “The Business Value of Ansible Automation Platform.” Document #US51839824, March 2024. 

Tags:Automation