Planning your installation

Platform gateway is the service that handles authentication and authorization for the Ansible Automation Platform. It provides a single entry into the Ansible Automation Platform and serves the platform user interface so you can authenticate and access all of the Ansible Automation Platform services from a single location. For more information about the services available in the Ansible Automation Platform, refer to Key functionality and concepts in Getting started with Ansible Automation Platform.

The platform gateway includes an activity stream that captures changes to gateway resources, such as the creation or modification of organizations, users, and service clusters, among others. For each change, the activity stream collects information about the time of the change, the user that initiated the change, the action performed, and the actual changes made to the object, when possible. The information gathered varies depending on the type of change.

You can access the details captured by the activity stream from the API:

/api/gateway/v1/activitystream/

/api/gateway/v1/activitystream/

Automation controller is an enterprise framework enabling users to define, operate, scale, and delegate Ansible automation across their enterprise.

Ansible automation hub is a repository for certified content of Ansible Content Collections. It is the centralized repository for Red Hat and its partners to publish content, and for customers to discover certified, supported Ansible Content Collections. Red Hat Ansible Certified Content provides users with content that has been tested and is supported by Red Hat.

Private automation hub provides both disconnected and on-premise solutions for synchronizing content. You can synchronize collections and execution environment images from Red Hat cloud automation hub, storing and serving your own custom automation collections and execution images. You can also use other sources such as Ansible Galaxy or other container registries to provide content to your private automation hub. Private automation hub can integrate into your enterprise directory and your CI/CD pipelines.

A high availability (HA) configuration increases reliability and scalablility for automation hub deployments.

HA deployments of automation hub have multiple nodes that concurrently run the same service with a load balancer distributing workload (an "active-active" configuration). This configuration eliminates single points of failure to minimize service downtime and allows you to easily add or remove nodes to meet workload demands.

The Event-Driven Ansible controller is the interface for event-driven automation and introduces automated resolution of IT requests. Event-Driven Ansible controller helps you connect to sources of events and act on those events by using rulebooks. This technology improves IT speed and agility, and enables consistency and resilience. With Event-Driven Ansible, you can:

Automation mesh is an overlay network intended to ease the distribution of work across a large and dispersed collection of workers through nodes that establish peer-to-peer connections with each other using existing networks.

Automation mesh provides:

Automation execution environments are container images on which all automation in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is run. They provide a solution that includes the Ansible execution engine and hundreds of modules that help users automate all aspects of IT environments and processes. Automation execution environments automate commonly used operating systems, infrastructure platforms, network devices, and clouds.

Ansible Galaxy is a hub for finding, reusing, and sharing Ansible content. Community-provided Galaxy content, in the form of prepackaged roles, can help start automation projects. Roles for provisioning infrastructure, deploying applications, and completing other tasks can be dropped into Ansible Playbooks and be applied immediately to customer environments.

Automation content navigator is a textual user interface (TUI) that becomes the primary command line interface into the automation platform, covering use cases from content building, running automation locally in an execution environment, running automation in Ansible Automation Platform, and providing the foundation for future integrated development environments (IDEs).

PostgreSQL (Postgres) is an open-source relational database management system. For Ansible Automation Platform, Postgres serves as the backend database to store automation data such as job templates, inventory, credentials, and execution history.

Ansible Automation Platform offers a centralized Redis instance in both standalone and clustered topologies. This enables resiliency by providing consistent performance and reliability.

With clustered Redis, data is automatically partitioned over multiple nodes to provide performance stability and nodes are assigned as replicas to provide reliability. Clustered Redis, shared between the platform gateway and Event-Driven Ansible, is provided by default when installing Ansible Automation Platform in containerized and operator-based deployments.

A cluster contains three primary nodes and each primary node contains a replica node.

If a primary instance becomes unavailable due to failures, the other primary nodes will initiate a failover state to promote a replica node to a primary node.

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The benefits of deploying clustered Redis over standalone Redis include the following:

Therefore, if you need data scalability and automatic failover, deploy Ansible Automation Platform with a clustered Redis. For more information about scalability with Redis, refer to Scale with Redis Cluster in the Redis product documentation.

For information on deploying Ansible Automation Platform with clustered Redis, refer to the RPM installation, Containerized installation, and Installing on OpenShift Container Platform guides.

Disclaimer: Links contained in this information to external website(s) are provided for convenience only. Red Hat has not reviewed the links and is not responsible for the content or its availability. The inclusion of any link to an external website does not imply endorsement by Red Hat of the website or their entities, products or services. You agree that Red Hat is not responsible or liable for any loss or expenses that may result due to your use of (or reliance on) the external site or content.

Standalone Redis consists of a simple architecture that is easy to deploy and configure.

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If a resilient solution is not a requirement, deploy Ansible Automation Platform with a standalone Redis.

The following table outlines the different ways to install or deploy Ansible Automation Platform:

For system requirements for the RPM installation method of Ansible Automation Platform, see the System requirements section of RPM installation.

For system requirements for the containerized installation method of Ansible Automation Platform, see the System requirements section of Containerized installation.

For system requirements for installing Ansible Automation Platform on OpenShift Container Platform, see the Tested system configurations section of Tested deployment models.

Choose the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installer if your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is connected to the internet. Installing with internet access retrieves the latest required repositories, packages, and dependencies. Choose one of the following ways to set up your Ansible Automation Platform installer.

scp -i private_key.pem aap-bundled-installer.tar.gz user@server_ip:

$ scp -i private_key.pem aap-bundled-installer.tar.gz user@server_ip:

curl -0 <download_url>

$ curl -0 <download_url>

tar xvzf aap-bundled-installer.tar.gz

$ tar xvzf aap-bundled-installer.tar.gz

When you use the RPM installer, the files are placed under the /opt/ansible-automation-platform/installer directory.

Use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Bundle installer if you are unable to access the internet, or would prefer not to install separate components and dependencies from online repositories. Access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux repositories is still needed. All other dependencies are included in the tar archive.

You can deprovision nodes and instance groups using the Ansible Automation Platform installer. Running the installer will remove all configuration files and logs attached to the nodes in the group.

To deprovision nodes, append node_state=deprovision to the node or group within the inventory file.

For example:

To remove a single node from a deployment:

[automationcontroller]
host1.example.com
host2.example.com
host4.example.com   node_state=deprovision

[automationcontroller]
host1.example.com
host2.example.com
host4.example.com   node_state=deprovision

or

To remove an entire instance group from a deployment:

[instance_group_restrictedzone]
host4.example.com
host5.example.com

[instance_group_restrictedzone:vars]
node_state=deprovision

[instance_group_restrictedzone]
host4.example.com
host5.example.com

[instance_group_restrictedzone:vars]
node_state=deprovision

The second part of the example inventory file, following [all:vars], is a list of variables used by the installer. Using all means the variables apply to all hosts.

To apply variables to a particular host, use [hostname:vars]. For example, [automationhub:vars].

The values of string variables are declared in quotes. For example:

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='<password>'

pg_database='awx'
pg_username='awx'
pg_password='<password>'

When declared in a :vars section, INI values are interpreted as strings. For example, var=FALSE creates a string equal to FALSE. Unlike host lines, :vars sections accept only a single entry per line, so everything after the = must be the value for the entry. Host lines accept multiple key=value parameters per line. Therefore they need a way to indicate that a space is part of a value rather than a separator. Values that contain whitespace can be quoted (single or double). For more information, see Python shlex parsing rules.

If a variable value set in an INI inventory must be a certain type (for example, a string or a boolean value), always specify the type with a filter in your task. Do not rely on types set in INI inventories when consuming variables.

If a parameter value in the Ansible inventory file contains special characters, such as #, { or }, you must double-escape the value (that is enclose the value in both single and double quotation marks).

For example, to use mypasswordwith#hashsigns as a value for the variable pg_password, declare it as pg_password='"mypasswordwith#hashsigns"' in the Ansible host inventory file.

Disclaimer: Links contained in this information to external website(s) are provided for convenience only. Red Hat has not reviewed the links and is not responsible for the content or its availability. The inclusion of any link to an external website does not imply endorsement by Red Hat of the website or their entities, products or services. You agree that Red Hat is not responsible or liable for any loss or expenses that may result due to your use of (or reliance on) the external site or content.

You can encrypt sensitive or secret variables with Ansible Vault. However, encrypting the variable names and the variable values makes it hard to find the source of the values. To circumvent this, you can encrypt the variables individually by using ansible-vault encrypt_string, or encrypt a file containing the variables.

You can further configure your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform installation by including additional variables in the inventory file. These configurations add optional features for managing your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Add these variables by editing the inventory file using a text editor.

A table of predefined values for inventory file variables can be found in Inventory file variables in the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Installation Guide.