What’s new in Event-Driven Ansible, part of Ansible Automation Platform 2.5

We are pleased to announce an updated version of Event-Driven Ansible as part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5!

This release includes expanded enterprise capabilities that can help you gain more operational ease from Event-Driven Ansible. Whether you are ready for advanced event-driven use cases that take into account multiple sources of events, want to advance your Event-Driven Ansible testing efforts into production, or want highly scalable and available Ansible Rulebook operations, this new version has you covered. Let’s dig into the details of these exciting new features:

Event-Driven Ansible: simplified event routing 

We are excited about this new feature, but first let’s set some context. Event-Driven Ansible supports both push and pull methods for receiving events. Supporting both push and pull event sources allows Event-Driven Ansible to work with a greater number of source providers, as not all providers support both push events and pull methods for communicating events. The primary way for event sources to “push” events to Event-Driven Ansible is through webhooks. In this type of communication, the source pushes events to a webhook endpoint. The other type of communication is to pull events from the source. In this type, events can be pulled from the event source’s API.

Starting with Ansible Automation Platform 2.5, we are simplifying how events can be pushed to Event-Driven Ansible. With simplified event routing, we are introducing event streams with support for webhook connections to Event-Driven Ansible. Event streams are an easy way to connect your sources to your rulebooks. This new capability lets you create a single endpoint to receive alerts from an event source and then use the events in multiple rulebooks. Formerly, you would have created a new endpoint for every event source within each rulebook you wanted to create. This simplifies rulebook activation setup, reduces maintenance demands and helps lower risk by eliminating multiple ports open through a firewall. 

These images illustrate the new simplified model for connecting event sources to rulebooks. You can see that your rulebook setup processes have now become faster, simpler, and easier to maintain with a single external route open on your firewall for all event streams. Once your source is connected, you can connect it to many different rulebook activations– so you can automate more and do it simply. 

Figure 1: Diagrams illustrating the “before and after” of simplified event routing 
in a push alert model. 

How does this work? 
Within simplified event routing, we are introducing event streams as an easy way to connect your sources to your rulebooks. The key benefits of event streams in Event-Driven Ansible are:

• Enabling webhook-based sources to be conveniently routed to one or many rulebook activations.
• Automatically configuring endpoints to which your webhook-based event sources can connect, via event streams. You no longer need to configure routing for each one of your rulebook activations.
• Delivering events to horizontally-scaled rulebook activations. (See high scalability below.)

Any event source that can emit a webhook, such as source control management tools (SCMs), ITSMs, observability tools and more, can send events directly to Event-Driven Ansible via event streams. These events in turn can be used for decisioning, with actions automatically taken when conditions are met.

Applying simplified event routing
Here are a few scenarios that can spark your imagination of what’s now possible:

• As a ServiceNow administrator, I want to be able to execute automation that will automatically fail over my data center if the number of support tickets alerting about a network failure goes above my threshold.
• As a developer, I would like to automatically reload and refresh my web servers when I commit new code to my repository.
• As a virtual infrastructure administrator, I would like to archive virtual machines and reclaim resources when a system detects virtual machines that haven’t been used for the past month.
• As a network administrator, I would like to write multiple rulebooks to automate recovery of network device functionality based on events from the same tool.
• As an IT operations engineer, I would like to write a rulebook that uses my enterprise’s observability tool to automate network operations. This tool is used across the company and by others who wish to automate based on the same intelligence.
• As an observability manager, I would like to configure Ansible Automation Platform to set up my enterprise observability tool for use across rulebooks in Event-Driven Ansible.

For more discussion of simplified event routing, refer to the documentation here.

Event-Driven Ansible: high scalability with high availability support

Event-Driven Ansible in Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 now supports installation of multiple Event-Driven Ansible nodes and thus enables you to create highly available active-active use cases. When you install Event-Driven Ansible in this way, you can employ failover scenarios such that if there is a failure, the system can continue to execute mission-critical rulebook activations so they do not fail to run. You gain scalability for rulebook capacity as well as extended capability to run rulebooks with greater availability. 

Let’s take an example. If you, as an administrator, would like Event-Driven Ansible to be resilient, you can use this new capability to create the deployment architecture that meets your specific needs. For example, you can limit or avoid issues with scalability or failure of rulebook execution. This helps you run event-driven automation jobs more confidently as part of a mission-critical automation platform. This type of scalability should be familiar to automation architects and administrators, because it has existed for some time in Ansible Automation Platform in regards to executing playbooks.

Event-Driven Ansible: enterprise enhancements

As part of the new unified interface for Ansible Automation Platform 2.5, additional features are now available to the event-driven component of Ansible Automation Platform. These features will enable you to advance and expand your use cases for event-driven automation across development, test and production environments and will enable you to bring proof of concept internal automation scenarios into production.

These new features include:

• Vault and credential management
  Event-Driven Ansible now has the ability to manage credentials which can be added to rulebook activations. These credentials can be used in rulebooks to authenticate to event sources. In addition, you can now attach vault credentials to rulebook activations so that you can use vaulted variables in rulebooks. Encrypted credentials and vaulted variables enable enterprises to secure use of Event-Driven Ansible within their environment.
   
• Authentication and Role-Based Access Control
  Customers have standardized mechanisms for providing authentication and authorization. By bringing authentication to the platform level, we are simplifying the administration of all components of Ansible Automation Platform and giving Event-Driven Ansible the ability to take advantage of the same enterprise authentication methods. Delivering a unified authentication mechanism helps unify and simplify the usage and administration. 
   
• Logging
  The Event-Driven Ansible server component maintains audit logs of any action executed such as running a rulebook activation, deleting a credential or creating an event stream. These log files can be parsed by any enterprise logging analyzer for security compliance.

With these additions as part of the new Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 unified interface, we cannot wait to see what you are able to accomplish in terms of streamlining the way you handle your complex Day 2 operations.

Event-Driven Ansible: Enhanced support and Event-Driven Ansible 2.4 compatibility

And finally, we have improved a key Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection, ansible.eda, have enabled backward compatibility, and have improved documentation: 

• ansible.eda collection enhancements
  This collection, developed and supported by Red Hat, provides a series of common event source integration capabilities – from Kafka and Prometheus alertmanager, to several cloud-based integrations and more. We have added to this collection the ability to manage Event-Driven Ansible infrastructure so it can automate itself. For example, automation administrators may want to automate Ansible infrastructure rollout through repeatable actions that are codified in an Ansible Rulebook for consistency, accuracy and speed. You can access this collection here. 
   
• Event-Driven Ansible 2.4 backward compatibility 
  Event-Driven Ansible 2.5 is interoperable with Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. To benefit from all these great new features in Event-Driven Ansible 2.5, you do not have to upgrade your existing Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. You can roll out a highly available and scalable Event-Driven Ansible 2.5 installation and connect it to your existing Ansible Automation Platform 2.4 controllers. This enables enterprises to leverage Event-Driven Ansible 2.5 to deliver value now even though you may not yet have the opportunity to upgrade your full Ansible Automation Platform 2.4.
   
• New additions to Event-Driven Ansible documentation
  In addition to covering the above capabilities in the documentation, we have also enhanced our documentation around general usage. As for installation, refer to these two sections in the documentation: installation and containerized installation.

Ready to learn more? 

These new enterprise capabilities will enable you to take event-driven automation to the next level for your organization through features that support the demands of large enterprise-scale IT operations. We are looking forward to seeing what dramatic benefits you can achieve and hope you will share these with us as you uncover new ways of working with event-driven automation. 

We are excited to host a webinar on Tuesday, October 8 at 11 AM ET. We will cover this new content and also answer as many of your questions as we can. Join us for this informative event:

Webinar registration

Resources

• Web page: redhat.com/event-driven-ansible
• Event-Driven Ansible Interactive self-paced labs
• Event-Driven Ansible documentation
• Event-Driven Ansible integration and demo videos
• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 blog