Our readers have spoken. Over the next few weeks, we'll be highlighting this year’s most popular articles from Red Hat engineers, architects, and other technical practitioners contributing to innovative open source solutions. Read on for the best of Ansible automation on Red Hat Developer in 2024.
IT automation is not just a tool for improving efficiency; it’s a critical business capability. Development teams are increasingly automating common tasks like infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and performing system updates.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform fosters rapid development and deployment through recent enhancements like the general availability of Ansible code bot, a Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed feature that scans your code repositories to recommend code quality improvements. The 2.5 release introduces new quick starts and also integrates the automation controller, Event-Driven Ansible, and Ansible automation hub into a single UI.
Learn more: What’s new in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5
If you're looking to build your understanding of basic Ansible concepts, the Foundations of Ansible learning path is a great place to start. We also have 8 preview chapters from the upcoming Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Ansible Automation Study Guide by Red Hatters Alex Soto Bueno and Andrew Block (O’Reilly Media) available for download at no cost.
The 10 most popular Ansible automation articles of 2024
Our most popular posts on automation from the past year cover monitoring, Ansible development tools, security automation, and more to help you take advantage of key Ansible Automation Platform features.
#10: Set up a streams for Apache Kafka cluster with Ansible
Based on the Apache Kafka project, streams for Apache Kafka is a powerful distributed event streaming platform. Using a fully distributed architecture, a streams for Apache Kafka cluster requires you to set up and deploy multiple services, ensure they are all properly configured, and that each component is functional and can communicate with each other.
For all these reasons, applying an automation solution such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deploy and manage streams for Apache Kafka makes a lot of sense, especially considering Ansible now has a collection dedicated for the product. This article walks through how to deploy a fully functional streams for Apache Kafka cluster in an automated fashion using Ansible.
Read it here: Set up a streams for Apache Kafka cluster with Ansible
#9: A fully automated setup of a JBoss EAP cluster using Ansible
This article demonstrates how to fully automate and deploy a Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) cluster using Ansible and the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for JBoss EAP.
This approach lets you focus primarily on deploying the application, while the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for JBoss EAP handles most of the heavy lifting.
Read it here: A fully automated setup of a JBoss EAP cluster using Ansible
#8: Monitor Ansible Automation Platform using Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana
Learn how to monitor Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform running on premises using Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana. The author explains how this stack offers a complete view for monitoring Ansible Automation Platform.
Using the integration with the Ansible Automation Platform API, you can oversee day-to-day use of resources such as jobs, templates, and failed or successful executions. Node Exporter lets you create a visualization of capacity and consumption of computational resources.
Read it here: Monitor Ansible Automation Platform using Prometheus, Node Exporter, and Grafana
#7: OpenShift application monitoring with Event-Driven Ansible and Alertmanager
Monitoring plays a crucial role in ensuring application reliability and performance. This tutorial explains how to set up effective application monitoring using Event-Driven Ansible automation and Alertmanager on Red Hat OpenShift. The process includes the following steps:
- Access the OpenShift cluster.
- Deploy the Quarkus application, Event-Driven Ansible, Prometheus, and Alertmanager.
- Test the Event-Driven Ansible functionality.
Read it here: OpenShift application monitoring with Event-Driven Ansible & Alertmanager
#6: Demystifying the role of an automation developer (it's not what you think)
By Anshul Behl
Put aside your job title or reporting structure—if you're an IT domain expert writing Ansible content to automate systems, you're an automation developer.
Despite what the title might suggest, an automation developer is not a traditional software developer. In fact, most automation developers (or automation engineers or platform engineers) don’t have extensive development skills or backgrounds in coding, yet they are creating Ansible content every day and contributing to the successful adoption of automation within their organization.
Read it here: Demystifying the role of an automation developer (it's not what you think)
#5: Event-Driven Ansible rulebook for automation
Event-Driven Ansible is an open source developer preview designed to flexibly enable teams to create event-driven automation scenarios across various IT domains (network, DevOps, security, CloudOps, infrastructure, and more).
This article explains how to install ansible-rulebook command-line interface (CLI) tools and use them when executing the rulebooks. You'll use the rulebook to create a conditional event, so whenever that event occurs, it will trigger and execute the playbook that you defined in action. This is the first step to event-driven development.
Read it here: Event-Driven Ansible rulebook for automation
#4: Generate Ansible Playbooks using natural language prompts
Discover how to generate complete Ansible Playbooks using natural language prompts with Red Hat's Ansible VS Code extension. The extension helps reduce the barrier of entry for new Ansible Playbook creation through a guided chat experience.
This article walks through how to install the VS Code extension, sign in to the Ansible Lightspeed, and generate a playbook. You'll also see how to explain the playbook with Ansible Lightspeed.
Read it here: Generate Ansible Playbooks using natural language prompts
#3: Patch updates on RHEL servers with Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
Efficiently managing server infrastructure is imperative, and regular patching is essential for maintaining security, stability, and compliance across enterprise environments. However, manual patching can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially for large server deployments.
This article is a helpful guide to automating patch updates of SELinux on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Read it here: Patch updates on RHEL servers with Ansible Automation Platform 2.4
#2: Monitor an Ansible Automation Platform database using Prometheus and Grafana
This article is for sysadmins or database administrators who need to monitor PostgreSQL and identify areas for performance or availability improvement. You'll learn how to install and configure the Postgres Exporter, which is responsible for collecting data and usage statistics for PostgreSQL.
The Prometheus, Postgres Exporter, and Grafana stack offers a complete view of PostgreSQL database health, such as configurations, resource consumption, shared buffer, data ingestion, writing and reading in databases, conflicts and deadlocks, checkpoint, cache, sessions, and transactions.
Read it here: Monitor an Ansible Automation Platform database using Prometheus and Grafana
#1: Create an efficient Ansible development environment in VS Code
When it comes to developing Ansible Playbooks and managing infrastructure, having a well-configured development environment can greatly enhance productivity.
In our most popular automation article of 2024, learn how to set up an Ansible development environment in the popular VS Code IDE (integrated development environment).
Read it here: Create an efficient Ansible development environment in VS Code
Build your Ansible knowledge
Learn how to create, manage, and scale automation with interactive hands-on labs and learning paths.
- Foundations of Ansible
- YAML essentials for Ansible
- Get started with Ansible Playbooks
- Getting started with Ansible Content Collections
- Get started with the Ansible Visual Studio Code extension
- Streamline automation in OpenShift Dev Spaces with Ansible
If you’re looking for short, focused introductions to automation and the benefits it offers, the following e-books have you covered:
- The cost of human error and the advantages of automation
- Enhance security with automation
- Automation at the edge
- Choosing an automation tool
- An IT executive's guide to automation
Download Ansible cheat sheets that show you how to manage and configure remote hosts and more:
- SSH into remote machines using Ansible
- Network automation with Ansible validated content
- WiFi automation with Ansible and SD-WAN Meraki
Browse our full automation content archive.
Get started with Ansible Automation Platform
The rest of the best
We'll be back with more content for tech practitioners in 2025. In the meantime, don't miss the rest of our 2024 year in review:
Last updated: December 20, 2024