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Why use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform with Red Hat OpenShift?

Updated September 20, 2024•3-minute read
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OverviewWhy automate hybrid clouds?How to use Ansible Automation Platform with Red Hat OpenShiftManage multiple Red Hat OpenShift clustersMigrating VMs

With Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift®, you can build and operateautomation at scale, with the flexibility to run applications anywhere you need them.

Connect your hybrid cloud

The benefits of automating hybrid cloud environments

If you need more flexibility than public, private, or on-premise infrastructure will allow, hybrid cloud environments offer numerous benefits. However, they often require separate, specialized management tools for cloud-native and on-premise environments, adding an extra layer of complexity to infrastructure, network, application, and user administration.

Ansible Automation Platform makes it easier to manage hybrid cloud environments by integrating with existing workflows and infrastructure. Using it along with Red Hat OpenShift, you can:

  • Automate the creation, deployment, and management of Red Hat OpenShift clusters.
  • Coordinate existing off-cluster infrastructure with cloud-native infrastructure and services.
  • Automate the daily cloud-operations tasks involved in Red Hat OpenShift cluster configuration and management.
  • Implement consistent and repeatable application and infrastructure lifecycle-management workflows.
  • Support deployment, scaling, and application updates reliably from 1 common framework.
  • Migrate and manage virtual machines (VMs) consistently and provision them for public or private cloud solutions.
  • Establish end-to-end business-continuity and disaster-recovery automation for Red Hat OpenShift clusters.

Because Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform both use YAML, a human-readable programming language, it’s easy to start using them together if your team already has expertise with either platform. Using the 2 together gives Red Hat OpenShift administrators a head start in creating Ansible Playbooks and helps automation developers more easily manage and deploy Red Hat OpenShift clusters while taking advantage of their existing expertise in Ansible and YAML.

Automate Red Hat OpenShift with Ansible Automation Platform

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How to use Ansible Automation Platform with Red Hat OpenShift

Install Ansible Automation Platform within Red Hat OpenShift

The easiest way to begin using Ansible Automation Platform within the Red Hat OpenShift platform is to install Ansible Automation Platform viaOperatorHub.

Navigate to the OperatorHub in the Red Hat OpenShift dashboard and search for the Ansible Automation Platform Operator. Installation only requires a few steps.

Once the Ansible Automation Platform Operator is installed on your Red Hat OpenShift cluster, you can create and deploy the components that make up Ansible Automation Platform, such as automation controller, Ansible automation hub, and Event-Driven Ansible. The operator makes it easier to autoscale and upgrade Ansible Automation Platform, helping you stay up to date with the latest version.

Use container groups within Ansible Automation Platform

Container groups in Ansible Automation Platform are specialized instance groups that dynamically provision pods within a Red Hat OpenShift cluster to execute jobs. These pods are created on demand and exist only for the duration of the playbook run, ensuring efficient resource use. This means users can run automation jobs within automation controller consistently, regardless of whether the automation controller is deployed as a standalone server, in a virtual environment, as a container, or within a Red Hat OpenShift environment. Thanks to this flexibility, Ansible Automation Platform can better manage diverse deployment scenarios while improving performance and scalability.

 

Learn how to install Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat OpenShift. Video duration: 2:25.

Manage multiple Red Hat OpenShift clusters

If you need to manage and automate operations in multiple clusters, even across different infrastructures, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes brings it all together. It extends the value of Red Hat OpenShift by deploying applications, managing multiple clusters, and enforcing policies across clusters at scale.

One benefit of using Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, and Ansible Automation Platform together is that you can start with what you’re most comfortable with.

If you’re already familiar with Red Hat OpenShift, you can begin automating clusters with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. But if you’re more comfortable with Ansible Automation Platform, you can write Ansible-native automation content for your Red Hat OpenShift clusters with Kubernetes application programming interfaces (APIs). You can even reuse and repurpose existing Ansible content as you adopt Red Hat OpenShift and more cloud-native technologies.

And once you’re using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, you can also automate off-cluster resources with Ansible Automation Platform. These can include network resources, security tools, physical infrastructure, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools. Automating off-cluster resources is helpful if your organization relies on traditional infrastructure or tools that can’t be migrated to your Red Hat OpenShift clusters, but still need to be automated alongside on-cluster resources.

Connect your entire hybrid environment with Ansible Automation Platform

How does Ansible Automation Platform migrate VMs with OpenShift Virtualization?

Outdated technology, rising costs, and technology sprawl are some of the main challenges in managing virtualization infrastructure. To address these challenges, organizations are migrating their VMs to modern solutions.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift, simplifies infrastructure modernization byhelping you migrate existing VMs and manage them from a single, unified application platform.

When combined with OpenShift Virtualization, Ansible Automation Platform is uniquely positioned to help you accelerate the migration of virtual environments consistently and at scale. Once you’ve migrated, you can also use Ansible Automation Platform to manage all your VMs with ease.

Additionally, Ansible Automation Platform helps you:

  • Provision VMs for public cloud or private cloud solutions.
  • Automate ongoing management tasks and orchestrate tasks across cloud and on-premise environments.
  • Create automation jobs with prepackaged bundles of certified and validated Ansible content.
  • Coordinate the deployment applications, networks, cloud services, and more.

Explore virtual infrastructure management with Ansible Automation Platform

Learn how to migrate your VMs with Ansible Automation Platform. Video duration: 0:57.

Manage virtual infrastructure with confidence

Learn about automating virtual infrastructure management with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

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