Ansible

In a previous blog, I announced the tech preview of containerized Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. With that we introduced a new feature to enable you to pre-seed configuration and content at installation time. This blog will take you through how that works.

Introduction Ansible validated content is a set of collections containing pre-built YAML content (such as playbooks or roles) to address the most common automation use cases. You can use Ansible validated content out-of-the-box or as a ... [More] learning opportunity to develop your automation skills. It's a trusted starting point to bootstrap your automation: use it, customize it and learn from it! [Less]

In the realm of automation, the ability to respond to events in real-time is a game-changer. At Red Hat, we've been pioneering in this space with Event-Driven Ansible, which can consume messages from various sources like AWS Simple Queue ... [More] Service (SQS), Azure Service Bus, and Kafka to trigger automated actions. Today, we're excited to delve into a powerful integration pattern involving AWS Lambda, AWS SQS, and Event-Driven Ansible. [Less]

Ansible Contributor Summit, Durham 2023 The Ansible Contributor Summit is a full day working session for community contributors to interact with one another and meet with the Ansible development teams behind the projects like AWX, Galaxy NG ... [More] , Molecule, Ansible Lint and Event-Driven Ansible. We will discuss important issues affecting the Ansible Community and help shape the future of collaboration. We are happy to have the opportunity to do a second Contributor Summit this year, and this time it will be part of DjangoCon US 2023 in Durham, NC. Our previous experience co-locating the Contributor Summit with another related event was in February in Ghent, Belgium as part of CfgMgmtCamp 2023. It was so successful, we wanted to do it again with another great match. Hello, Durham! We will be meeting in the "Bull City", the home of Ansible itself and the inspiration for our beloved mascot, Ansibull. In case you didn't know, the Ansible office overlooks the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and this mixed with Ansible word play is why you might see mentions of bulls and Ansibulls in Ansible land. If you can't attend the event in person in Durham, worry not! Ansible Contributor Summit is a hybrid event, so you will be able to join online. Details will follow later on how to do it, but we will have both streaming for the presentations and communication channels to participate in the hackathons or sprints. Check how to register for the online event below. Make the Contributor Summit yours What would you like to hear about at the Ansible Contributor Summit? Are there topics you'd like to discuss or parts of the project you'd like to hack on? Propose your ideas in the following topic in the new Ansible Community Forum. Please do it by Friday, October 6, so we can prepare the agenda for the event.  Provide the following information: Name of the speaker/facilitator Topic Details or abstract Type: Presentation, Discussion, Hacking or Other Estimated duration There is no need to have a presentation or slides ready at submission time. If you have an idea, propose it! We would love to hear about it. How to attend: Register now, it's free! Ansible Contributor Summit will be part of DjangoCon US 2023 For this new edition we are joining forces with DjangoCon US, so you can expect some extra discussions and topics around Python and Django in the Ansible projects. If you are interested in contributing to AWX (upstream of automation controller, formerly Red Hat Ansible Tower) or Galaxy NG (upstream of Ansible automation hub), this might be a great opportunity.  To join in-person: Date: Thursday, October 19, 2023 Location: Durham Convention Center, NC 27701 Room: Meeting room 1-2 (sessions), Meeting room 3-4 (lunch) Registration: Please register hereand select the ticket for Ansible Contributor Summit + Sprint (Thursday, October 19). The Ansible Contributor Summit ticket is free. Let the community know you are participating by replying to this Forum topic To join online: Registration: Please register here and select the ticket for Ansible Contributor Summit + Sprint Online (Thursday, October 19). The Ansible Contributor Summit ticket is free. Online chat: https://matrix.to/#/#summit:ansible.com Forum topic: https://forum.ansible.com/t/ansible-contributor-summit-durham-2023/28  More information (such as live streams) will be provided closer to the event Let the community know you are participating by replying to this Forum topic COVID-19 Policy Please refer to DjangoCon's COVID-19 In-Person Policy. As we are part of DjangonCon's Sprints, we will adhere to the same policy. DjangoCon will provide masks and test kits on-site if you are unable to obtain them in advance. Code of Conduct For Ansible community events, we adhere to the Ansible Community Code of Conduct.  [Less]

Ansible Contributor Summit, Durham 2023 The Ansible Contributor Summit is a full day working session for community contributors to interact with one another and meet with the Ansible development teams behind the projects like AWX, Galaxy NG ... [More] , Molecule, Ansible Lint and Event-Driven Ansible. We will discuss important issues affecting the Ansible Community and help shape the future of collaboration. We are happy to have the opportunity to do a second Contributor Summit this year, and this time it will be part of DjangoCon US 2023 in Durham, NC. Our previous experience co-locating the Contributor Summit with another related event was in February in Ghent, Belgium as part of CfgMgmtCamp 2023. It was so successful, we wanted to do it again with another great match. Read more… (3 min remaining to read) [Less]

Everything you know and love about Ansible Automation Platform in containerized form We’re excited to announce something that we’ve been working on for a while now, the technical preview of a containerized Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform solution.

New Ansible Galaxy For awhile, the Red Hat Ansible team behind the components Ansible automation hub and Ansible cloud automation hub at console.redhat.com have been on a special ops mission to enhance the galaxy_ng code base that serves the ... [More] aforementioned components to also serve galaxy.ansible.com, with the intention of replacing galaxy.ansible.com with a fresh code base. Galaxy, a legacy far far away… The current Galaxy service has been running at galaxy.ansible.com for many years and is hugely successful in the community. It drives and nurtures Ansible adoption by sharing prebuilt Ansible content that solves many automation challenges. One of the statistics we are most proud of are the contributions of 33,965 individual automation answers by the community in either Ansible Content Collections or Ansible Roles. Some of the top ranking automation content includes AWS, VMware, Linux, and Windows. Community users are able to download content for free, self-supported and interact with authors via GitHub for any further help or enhancements. We are excited to announce that the galaxy.ansible.com code base is being updated with a host of exciting new features that the Ansible community can look forward to. Brought to you by the Red Hat Ansible team behind Ansible Automation Hub and Ansible Cloud Automation Hub on console.redhat.com, this new version will enhance the galaxy_ng code base that also serves the above listed components. As galaxy.ansible.com ages, the frameworks it sits on requires consistent maintenance for security vulnerabilities, including frequent patching. The team is committed to keeping Galaxy secure and high-functioning, so we set out to enable Galaxy with an automation hub, otherwise known as the galaxy_ng codebase. New Generation The galaxy_ng code base was always started with the intent to replace the original Galaxy at some point, and also serve as the same code base for the Ansible automation hub component found in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Clearly maintaining one code base for more than one presentation has engineering and architecture benefits for Red Hat and the community, but also the community benefits from more QE, more usage of the code base and adoption of the various uses by organizations. This is a win for everyone. It's been a long road to get here. We have had to continue with the progression of an automation hub at the same time as delivering community-only features into the code base, likesocial authentication for GitHub being required in Galaxy but not in the automation hub. We are now at the point where we should make the switch and start the new journey on the galaxy_ng code base, together. The Switch The new galaxy service has been running since the beginning of the year on a URL known as beta-galaxy.ansible.com. This URL has hosted many community members and some institutions, who have helped interact with us on the service. The old galaxy.ansible.com service has been running as per usual; we have a sync between the two to make sure the beta-galaxy.ansible.com site is up to date. We already have a URL called old-galaxy.ansible.com pointing to a read-only version of the galaxy.ansible.com service as it is today. On September 30, we will switch the IP records used by galaxy.ansible.com to use the records that beta-galaxy.ansible.com uses. Summary: https://old-galaxy.ansible.com/ will point to old Galaxy https://galaxy.ansible.com/ will point to new galaxy_ng https://beta-galaxy.ansible.com/ will point to new galaxy_ng This means if the switch is not successful, we can easily switch back or ask the community to try the older service. But we have tested a lot, so everything should go to plan. After the Switch @rochacbruno has written up this awesome table to show what was in Galaxy vs the new beta Galaxy site. You will notice not everything has been reimplemented into galaxy_ng due to time constraints, but we are open to discussions on forum.ansible.com if something should come back, and more importantly, we wish for the community to help design new features to be introduced. A good example of features that have not yet been reformulated is the current scoring system. We are retaining the old scores, so nobody loses out on the kudos they have earned already, however, we feel that a new scoring system needs to be implemented,and we’d love to begin soliciting community contributions for how we can improve it. Feature Galaxy Beta Galaxy Reason Sign in/up via GitHub ✔️ ✔️ API Key ✔️ ✔️ E-mail/App Notifications ✔️ ❌ Low usage Following authors and content ✔️ ❌ Low usage Multiple e-mail address per account ✔️ ❌ Low usage Search with filters ✔️ ✔️ Improved on Beta Download Count ✔️ ✔️ Popular Tags ✔️ TBD Platform mark ✔️ ❌ Feature replaced by tags Content Score ✔️ TBD Read only data will be kept, scoring system will be redesigned Content list and search ✔️ ✔️ Improved on beta Content docs ✔️ ✔️ Improved on beta Upload new collections ✔️ ✔️ Improved on beta Import logs ✔️ ✔️ Improved on beta List my namespaces ✔️ ✔️ Simplified on beta Admin namespace access for contributors ✔️ ✔️ Simplified on beta Add multiple provider namespaces for collections ✔️ ❌ Was not being used UI to Import Role from Github ✔️ ❌ Recommendation is to publish collections instead, existing roles can still be maintainer via CLI Task Management ❌ ✔️ User can watch tasks spawned, useful for watching status of CLI imports The Future With the new service running on galaxy_ng, we have a lot of new capabilities we can look to introduce going forward. Here are some to think about. Zero downtime for Galaxy service with A-B deployments Execution environment image hosting, serving. Execution environment image introspection. Improved NetFlix style dashboards for content. Image building from content Notification integrations Global searches The single code base means we can be more agile, more responsive and more receptive to the community around the Galaxy service. We hope you'll enjoy it. Call to Action Saturday September 30th 2023 is the switch over date. If you wish to participate in future enhancements by way of discussions or pull requests, you can find galaxy_ng here. We warmly invite all contributors to provide their valuable feedback on forum.ansible.com, utilizing the galaxy tag. If you are having issues with the new Ansible Galaxy, please check out this forum topic for known issues, links for fixes, where to track updates, how to ask for help, and more. [Less]

New Ansible Galaxy For awhile, the Red Hat Ansible team behind the components Ansible automation hub and Ansible cloud automation hub at console.redhat.com have been on a special ops mission to enhance the galaxy_ng code base that serves the ... [More] aforementioned components to also serve galaxy.ansible.com, with the intention of replacing galaxy.ansible.com with a fresh code base. Galaxy, a legacy far far away… The current Galaxy service has been running at galaxy.ansible.com for many years and is hugely successful in the community. It drives and nurtures Ansible adoption by sharing prebuilt Ansible content that solves many automation challenges. One of the statistics we are most proud of are the contributions of 33,965 individual automation answers by the community in either Ansible Content Collections or Ansible Roles. Some of the top ranking automation content includes AWS, VMware, Linux, and Windows. Community users are able to download content for free, self-supported and interact with authors via GitHub for any further help or enhancements. Read more… (4 min remaining to read) [Less]

For awhile, the Red Hat Ansible team behind the components Ansible automation hub and Ansible cloud automation hub at console.redhat.com have been on a special ops mission to enhance the galaxy_ng code base that serves the aforementioned ... [More] components to also serve galaxy.ansible.com, with the intention of replacing galaxy.ansible.com with a fresh code base. [Less]