5 reasons to migrate to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2

With an updated architecture, new tooling, and better performance,¹ Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform 2 offers a solid foundation for IT automation across the hybrid cloud. This latest platform version adds significant automation capabilities while expanding automation more deeply into the application development life cycle and more broadly into new and emerging IT domains. In this checklist, learn the top five reasons you should migrate to Ansible Automation Platform 2.

IT organizations need an automation platform that can bridge the datacenter with modern cloud services—and beyond. Ansible Automation Platform 2 helps customers create, manage, and scale automation across any environment with consistency. The release of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 comes with a reimagined architecture that delivers popular features, such as automation mesh and automation execution environments, with an entire suite of tools and components that help developers and operations teams efficiently and transparently scale automation across their organizations in a standardized way. A Red Hat subscription ensures access to an extensive library of certified automation content and ecosystem integrations. You can build your automation strategy with confidence due to interoperability across vendors and clouds.

Automation tools are no longer the domain of specialists. Both IT operations teams and developers must now be supported as automators, but to do so requires automation technology that is easily portable, flexible, and scalable to stretch across IT footprints. Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces the concept of automation execution environments (taking the place of Red Hat Ansible Engine), which deliver self-contained automation spaces that can be easily replicated and repeated across an organization. This consistency helps teams collaborate to create, manage, and scale automation with more speed and efficiency. Features such as the automation services catalog and Ansible automation hub make it easier than ever for automation to be shared across teams, while Red Hat Insights offers real time analytics and reporting. 

Ansible Automation Platform 2 includes new tools to make building and deploying automation a more efficient experience between automation developers, creators, and IT operations teams. Execution environment builder (ansible-builder) is a new command line tool that builds discrete containerized Ansible environments. It helps automation creators and operators build and distribute execution environments (EEs) with the exact Ansible content their jobs need, allowing those EEs to be shared and used in a repeatable, reliable way, wherever automation is needed. Automation content navigator (ansible-navigator) is a new top-level platform interface for automation creators and developers. It can be used as a command line interface or a textual user interface bundled with Ansible Automation Platform 2. Teams can now validate that the automation content is working as it should across even the largest environments. This interface helps automators maintain operational consistency across their systems, from developer workstations to staging platforms to production.

With the updated automation controller (formerly Red Hat Ansible Tower), you can more reliably and consistently scale automation on demand, taking a systematic approach to standardizing automation practices while reducing automation irregularities across the enterprise.

Automation controller 4.1 delivers significant performance improvements compared to Ansible Tower 3.8:¹  

• Average job duration decreased by ~22%. 
•  Job events processing time decreased by ~23%.  
• Cleanup job runtime decreased by ~98%.  
• Gather analytics runtime decreased by ~60%.

One of the most important new features in Ansible Automation Platform 2 is the automation mesh component, which allows automation at scale across the open hybrid cloud. 

Automation mesh includes a built-in overlay network that provides maximum flexibility in deploying distributed, remote, or otherwise complex automation deployments with a security-first approach by bringing automation closer to where you need it.

It offers independent scaling of control and execution plane capacity and flexible and fault-tolerant design options that are resilient to high latency and connection disruptions.

It maximizes your automation investments by scaling your automation across dispersed networks, multiple geographies, and diverse environments—from the datacenter, to the cloud, and out to edge environments. 

This scalability provides you with flexibility and resiliency, without sacrificing security features—so you can better adopt and scale automation.