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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Stumbling Blocks

Article from ADMIN 89/2025

By Martin Loschwitz

After acquiring Ansible, Red Hat integrated it into its portfolio and now offers the Ansible Automation Platform as a comprehensive automation and orchestration tool. We look at how the product performs in practice.

Ansible is immensely popular among admins, not least because of its relatively easy-to-learn syntax. Anyone who has ever worked with Puppet or SaltStack knows the kind of infrastructure required to run these systems. Ansible takes a far more lightweight approach: All you need is SSH access to the command line – either directly as root or with sudo on the target system – to assume the admin role.

Ansible does not rely on the complicated declarative syntax that Puppet uses. Instead, Ansible instructions are more like commented shell scripts that list the tasks to be performed step by step in exactly the same order in which they will be executed on the system. Moreover, you have the option of adding an explanation for each step.

Enhanced AWX

If you just want to automate a few tasks on a target system, the feature set is fine. Things get more complicated when you need to integrate automation with an external ruleset, such as compliance and security requirements, and become difficult if you need granular rights management. If you want to allow different users to execute different commands on systems, the standard version of Ansible will not do the trick.

Ansible developers themselves identified this shortcoming long ago and introduced a solution to the problem in the form of AWX, an open source web-based user interface and task engine for managing Ansible automation. AWX wraps itself around Ansible on the command line and adds features. The new tricks include comprehensive role-based access control (RBAC) rights management, as well as the ability to create continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for automated execution of specific tasks started fresh from clean environments. One result is that organizations can avoid the problem of some Ansible commands on non-standard systems having undesirable effects on the target hosts.

Although AWX

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