Ansible Advanced Topics

So far we’ve covered some of the basics of using ansible to make changes on a target Linux host. In this section we’ll cover slightly more advanced topics that can be useful when using ansible for configuration management.

The logical progression when starting to use ansible from the command line is to implement a level of governance around who can make changes, track the changes that are made and control access to who can make the changes. Redhat has a product, Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) designed to implement these controls and more. See https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible for more details on the product.

The purpose of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is to provide a centralized, enterprise-ready platform for automating IT operations, application deployment, cloud provisioning, security workflows, and infrastructure management at scale.

While open-source Ansible provides the automation engine, Ansible Automation Platform adds enterprise features such as:

Centralized Automation

  • Manage playbooks, inventories, credentials, and execution from a single web interface.
  • Replace manually running ansible-playbook commands from individual workstations.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

  • Control who can run, modify, approve, and schedule automation jobs.
  • Integrates with enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Entra ID, LDAP, and SAML.

Job Scheduling and Automation

  • Schedule recurring tasks.
  • Trigger automation from events, APIs, webhooks, or service tickets.

Self-Service Automation

  • Allow help desk staff, application teams, or developers to run approved automation without direct server access.

Audit and Compliance

Maintain logs of:

  • Who ran a job
  • When it was run
  • What changes were made
  • Whether it succeeded or failed

This is especially useful in regulated environments such as GCC High, DoD, healthcare, and financial organizations.

We have another workshop just focusing on AAP as a configuration management tool. Learning how ansible works from the CLI though is a great first step.