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Chapter 4. Installing and configuring automation hub on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console

You can use these instructions to install the automation hub operator on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, specify custom resources, and deploy Ansible Automation Platform with an external database.

Automation hub configuration can be done through the automation hub pulp_settings or directly in the user interface after deployment. However, it is important to note that configurations made in pulp_settings take precedence over settings made in the user interface. Hub settings should always be set as lowercase on the Hub custom resource specification.

Note

When an instance of automation hub is removed, the PVCs are not automatically deleted. This can cause issues during migration if the new deployment has the same name as the previous one. Therefore, it is recommended that you manually remove old PVCs before deploying a new automation hub instance in the same namespace. See Finding and deleting PVCs for more information.

4.1. Prerequisites
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  • You have installed the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform operator in Operator Hub.

4.2. Installing the automation hub operator
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  1. Navigate to Operators Installed Operators.
  2. Locate the Automation hub entry, then click Create instance.

Automation hub requires ReadWriteMany file-based storage, Azure Blob storage, or Amazon S3-compliant storage for operation so that multiple pods can access shared content, such as collections.

The process for configuring object storage on the AutomationHub CR is similar for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage.

If you are using file-based storage and your installation scenario includes automation hub, ensure that the storage option for Ansible Automation Platform Operator is set to ReadWriteMany. ReadWriteMany is the default storage option.

In addition, OpenShift Data Foundation provides a ReadWriteMany or S3-compliant implementation. Also, you can set up NFS storage configuration to support ReadWriteMany. This, however, introduces the NFS server as a potential, single point of failure.

To ensure successful installation of Ansible Automation Platform Operator, you must provision your storage type for automation hub initially to ReadWriteMany access mode.

Procedure

  1. Click Provisioning to update the access mode.
  2. In the first step, update the accessModes from the default ReadWriteOnce to ReadWriteMany.
  3. Complete the additional steps in this section to create the persistent volume claim (PVC).

4.2.1.2. Configuring object storage on Amazon S3
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Red Hat supports Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for automation hub. You can configure it when deploying the AutomationHub custom resource (CR), or you can configure it for an existing instance.

Prerequisites

  • Create an Amazon S3 bucket to store the objects.
  • Note the name of the S3 bucket.

Procedure

  1. Create a Kubernetes secret containing the AWS credentials and connection details, and the name of your Amazon S3 bucket. The following example creates a secret called test-s3: 

    $ oc -n $HUB_NAMESPACE apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: 'test-s3'
stringData:
  s3-access-key-id: $S3_ACCESS_KEY_ID
  s3-secret-access-key: $S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  s3-bucket-name: $S3_BUCKET_NAME
  s3-region: $S3_REGION
EOF
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  2. Add the secret to the automation hub custom resource (CR) spec: 

    spec:
  object_storage_s3_secret: test-s3
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  3. If you are applying this secret to an existing instance, restart the API pods for the change to take effect. <hub-name> is the name of your hub instance. 
$ oc -n $HUB_NAMESPACE delete pod -l app.kubernetes.io/name=<hub-name>-api
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4.2.1.3. Configuring object storage on Azure Blob
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Red Hat supports Azure Blob Storage for automation hub. You can configure it when deploying the AutomationHub custom resource (CR), or you can configure it for an existing instance.

Prerequisites

  • Create an Azure Storage blob container to store the objects.
  • Note the name of the blob container.

Procedure

  1. Create a Kubernetes secret containing the credentials and connection details for your Azure account, and the name of your Azure Storage blob container. The following example creates a secret called test-azure: 

    $ oc -n $HUB_NAMESPACE apply -f- <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: 'test-azure'
stringData:
  azure-account-name: $AZURE_ACCOUNT_NAME
  azure-account-key: $AZURE_ACCOUNT_KEY
  azure-container: $AZURE_CONTAINER
  azure-container-path: $AZURE_CONTAINER_PATH
  azure-connection-string: $AZURE_CONNECTION_STRING
EOF
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  2. Add the secret to the automation hub custom resource (CR) spec: 

    spec:
  object_storage_azure_secret: test-azure
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  3. If you are applying this secret to an existing instance, restart the API pods for the change to take effect. <hub-name> is the name of your hub instance. 
$ oc -n $HUB_NAMESPACE delete pod -l app.kubernetes.io/name=<hub-name>-api
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The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform operator installation form allows you to further configure your automation hub operator route options under Advanced configuration.

  1. Click Advanced configuration.
  2. Under Ingress type, click the drop-down menu and select Route.
  3. Under Route DNS host, enter a common host name that the route answers to.
  4. Under Route TLS termination mechanism, click the drop-down menu and select Edge or Passthrough.
  5. Under Route TLS credential secret, click the drop-down menu and select a secret from the list.

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform operator installation form allows you to further configure your automation hub operator Ingress under Advanced configuration.

Procedure

  1. Click Advanced Configuration.
  2. Under Ingress type, click the drop-down menu and select Ingress.
  3. Under Ingress annotations, enter any annotations to add to the ingress.
  4. Under Ingress TLS secret, click the drop-down menu and select a secret from the list.

After you have configured your automation hub operator, click Create at the bottom of the form view. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform will now create the pods. This may take a few minutes.

You can view the progress by navigating to Workloads Pods and locating the newly created instance.

Verification

Verify that the following operator pods provided by the Ansible Automation Platform Operator installation from automation hub are running:

Expand
Operator manager controllersautomation controllerautomation hub

The operator manager controllers for each of the 3 operators, include the following:

  • automation-controller-operator-controller-manager
  • automation-hub-operator-controller-manager
  • resource-operator-controller-manager

After deploying automation controller, you will see the addition of these pods:

  • controller
  • controller-postgres

After deploying automation hub, you will see the addition of these pods:

  • hub-api
  • hub-content
  • hub-postgres
  • hub-redis
  • hub-worker
Note

A missing pod can indicate the need for a pull secret. Pull secrets are required for protected or private image registries. See Using image pull secrets for more information. You can diagnose this issue further by running oc describe pod <pod-name> to see if there is an ImagePullBackOff error on that pod.

Configure LDAP authentication settings for Ansible Automation Platform on OpenShift Container Platform in the spec section of your Hub instance configuration file.

Procedure

  • Use the following example to configure LDAP in your automation hub instance. For any blank fields, enter ``. 

    spec:
    pulp_settings:
      auth_ldap_user_attr_map:
        email: "mail"
        first_name: "givenName"
        last_name: "sn"
      auth_ldap_group_search_base_dn: 'cn=groups,cn=accounts,dc=example,dc=com'
      auth_ldap_bind_dn: ' '
      auth_ldap_bind_password: ' '
      auth_ldap_group_search_filter: (objectClass=posixGroup)
      auth_ldap_user_search_scope: SUBTREE
      auth_ldap_server_uri: 'ldap://ldapserver:389'
      authentication_backend_preset: ldap
      auth_ldap_mirror_groups: 'True'
      auth_ldap_user_search_base_dn: 'cn=users,cn=accounts,dc=example,dc=com'
      auth_ldap_bind_password: 'ldappassword'
      auth_ldap_user_search_filter: (uid=%(user)s)
      auth_ldap_group_search_scope: SUBTREE
      auth_ldap_user_flags_by_group: '@json {"is_superuser": "cn=tower-admin,cn=groups,cn=accounts,dc=example,dc=com"}'
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Note

Do not leave any fields empty. For fields with no variable, enter `` to indicate a default value.

4.4. Accessing the automation hub user interface
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You can access the automation hub interface once all pods have successfully launched.

  1. Navigate to Networking Routes.
  2. Under Location, click on the URL for your automation hub instance.

The automation hub user interface launches where you can sign in with the administrator credentials specified during the operator configuration process.

Note

If you did not specify an administrator password during configuration, one was automatically created for you. To locate this password, go to your project, select Workloads Secrets and open controller-admin-password. From there you can copy the password and paste it into the Automation hub password field.

For users who prefer to deploy Ansible Automation Platform with an external database, they can do so by configuring a secret with instance credentials and connection information, then applying it to their cluster using the oc create command.

By default, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform operator automatically creates and configures a managed PostgreSQL pod in the same namespace as your Ansible Automation Platform deployment.

You can choose to use an external database instead if you prefer to use a dedicated node to ensure dedicated resources or to manually manage backups, upgrades, or performance tweaks.

Note

The same external database (PostgreSQL instance) can be used for both automation hub and automation controller as long as the database names are different. In other words, you can have multiple databases with different names inside a single PostgreSQL instance.

The following section outlines the steps to configure an external database for your automation hub on a Ansible Automation Platform operator.

Prerequisite

The external database must be a PostgreSQL database that is the version supported by the current release of Ansible Automation Platform.

Note

Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 supports PostgreSQL 13.

Procedure

The external postgres instance credentials and connection information will need to be stored in a secret, which will then be set on the automation hub spec.

  1. Create a postgres_configuration_secret .yaml file, following the template below: 

    apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: external-postgres-configuration
  namespace: <target_namespace>
    1 
    
stringData:
  host: "<external_ip_or_url_resolvable_by_the_cluster>"
    2 
    
  port: "<external_port>"
    3 
    
  database: "<desired_database_name>"
  username: "<username_to_connect_as>"
  password: "<password_to_connect_with>"
    4 
    
  sslmode: "prefer"
    5 
    
  type: "unmanaged"
type: Opaque
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    1
    Namespace to create the secret in. This should be the same namespace you wish to deploy to.
    2
    The resolvable hostname for your database node.
    3
    External port defaults to 5432.
    4
    Value for variable password should not contain single or double quotes (', ") or backslashes (\) to avoid any issues during deployment, backup or restoration.
    5
    The variable sslmode is valid for external databases only. The allowed values are: prefer, disable, allow, require, verify-ca, and verify-full.

  2. Apply external-postgres-configuration-secret.yml to your cluster using the oc create command. 

    $ oc create -f external-postgres-configuration-secret.yml
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  3. When creating your AutomationHub custom resource object, specify the secret on your spec, following the example below: 

    apiVersion: awx.ansible.com/v1beta1
kind: AutomationHub
metadata:
  name: hub-dev
spec:
  postgres_configuration_secret: external-postgres-configuration
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4.6. Finding and deleting PVCs
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A persistent volume claim (PVC) is a storage volume used to store data that automation hub and automation controller applications use. These PVCs are independent from the applications and remain even when the application is deleted. If you are confident that you no longer need a PVC, or have backed it up elsewhere, you can manually delete them.

Procedure

  1. List the existing PVCs in your deployment namespace: 

    oc get pvc -n <namespace>
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  2. Identify the PVC associated with your previous deployment by comparing the old deployment name and the PVC name.

  3. Delete the old PVC: 

    oc delete pvc -n <namespace> <pvc-name>
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