Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By : Sean Sullivan
Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By: Sean Sullivan

Overview of this book

While you can use any automation software to simplify task automation, scaling automation to suit your growing business needs becomes difficult using only a command-line tool. Ansible Automation Platform standardizes how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, and this comprehensive guide shows you how you can simplify and scale its management. The book starts by taking you through the ways to get Ansible Automation Platform installed, their pros and cons, and the initial configuration. You’ll learn about each object in the platform, how it interacts with other objects, as well as best practices for defining and managing objects to save time. You’ll see how to maintain the created pieces with infrastructure as code. As you advance, you’ll monitor workflows with CI/CD playbooks and understand how Ansible Automation Platform integrates with many other services such as GitLab and GitHub. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through real-world examples to make the most of the platform while learning how to manipulate, manage, and deploy any playbook to Ansible Automation Platform.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Ansible Automation Platform Up and Running
6
Part 2: Configuring AAP
13
Part 3: Extending Ansible Tower

Overview of Automation hub and its content sources

Automation hub is a repository for the collections and container images that the Automation controller uses. As discussed, in organizations, a credential is used to determine which repository to pull those collections from. Automation hub contains many sources it can pull container images and collections from.

The following diagram shows the sources that are stored in a private Automation hub:

Figure 9.1 – Private Automation hub content sources

Automation hub has three sources for collections, as follows:

  • Certified: Certified collections that have been vetted by Red Hat. They are developed, tested, and supported by Red Hat. For some collections, this is in partnership with other companies.
  • Published: Collections that have been published to Automation hub. These are collections that anyone who has been granted access to a namespace can publish. These are collections made by you or other...