Red Hat SummitChapter 1. Key functionality and concepts
With Ansible Automation Platform, you can create, manage, and scale automation for your organization across users, teams, and regions. See the following functionality and concepts of Ansible Automation Platform for more details.
The release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 introduces an updated, unified user interface (UI) that allows you to interact with and manage each part of the platform.
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.
1.1. Activity stream
The platform gateway includes an activity stream that captures changes to platform 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/1.2. Automation execution
The centerpiece of Ansible Automation Platform is its automation execution command and control center, where you can deploy, define, operate, scale and delegate automation across your enterprise. With this functionality, you can perform a variety of tasks from a single location, such as running playbooks from a simple, straightforward web UI, monitoring dashboard activity, and centralized logging to manage and track job execution.
In the automation execution environment, you can use automation controller tasks to build job templates, which standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, and delegated, making it more reusable and consistent.
1.2.1. Inventories
An inventory is a single file, usually in INI or YAML format, containing a list of hosts and groups that can be acted upon using Ansible commands and playbooks. You can use an inventory file to specify your installation scenario and describe host deployments to Ansible. You can also use an inventory file to organize managed nodes in centralized files that give Ansible with system information and network locations.
1.2.2. Policy enforcement
Policy enforcement at automation runtime is a feature that uses encoded rules to define, manage, and enforce policies that govern how your users interact with your Ansible Automation Platform instance. Policy enforcement automates policy management, improving security, compliance, and efficiency. Policy enforcement points can be configured at the level of the inventory, job template, or organization. For more, see Implementing policy enforcement in the Configuring automation execution guide.
1.3. Automation content
Automation hub is the central location for your Ansible Automation Platform content. In automation hub you can also find content collections that you can download and integrate into your automation environment. You can also create and upload your own content to distribute to your users.
An Ansible Content Collection is a ready-to-use toolkit for automation and can include multiple types of content, including roles, modules, playbooks, and plugins all in one place.
You can access automation hub in one of two ways:
- On the Red Hat-hosted Hybrid Cloud Console, where you can find Red Hat validated or certified content that you can sync to your platform environment.
- On a self-hosted, on-premise private automation hub, where you can curate content for your automation users and manage access to collections and execution environments.
Depending on the way you access automation hub, you may have access to different types of content collections.
There are two types of Red Hat Ansible content:
- Ansible Certified Content Collections, which Red Hat builds, supports, and maintains. Certified collections are included in your subscription to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and can be found in automation hub.
- Ansible validated content collections, which are customizable and therefore do not have a support guarantee, but have been tested in the Ansible Automation Platform environment.
For more information about Ansible content, see Create automation content in Getting started as an automation developer.
1.3.1. Ansible roles
Ansible roles allow you to create reusable automation content that helps teams to work more efficiently and avoid duplicating efforts. With roles, you can group together a broader range of existing automation content, like playbooks, configuration files, templates, tasks, and handlers to create customized automation content that can be reused and shared with others.
You can also make roles configurable by exposing variables that users can set when calling the role, allowing them to configure their system according to their organization’s requirements.
Roles are generally included in Ansible content collections.
Additional resources
For more information, see Bundle content with Ansible roles.
1.3.2. Ansible playbooks
Playbooks are YAML files that contain specific sets of human-readable instructions, or “plays,” that you send to run on a single target or groups of targets. Ansible playbooks are repeatable and reusable configuration management tools designed to deploy complex applications.
You can use playbooks to manage configurations of and deployments to remote machines to sequence multitiered rollouts involving rolling updates. Use playbooks to delegate actions to other hosts, interacting with monitoring servers and load balancers along the way.
Once written, you can use and re-use playbooks for automation across your enterprise. For example, if you need to run a task more than once, write a playbook and put it under source control. Then, you can use the playbook to push out new configuration or confirm the configuration of remote systems.
Ansible playbooks can declare configurations, orchestrate steps of any manually ordered process on many machines in a defined order, or start tasks synchronously or asynchronously.
You can also use Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed, Ansible’s generative AI service, to create and develop playbooks to fit your needs. See the Ansible Lightspeed documentation for more information.
1.4. Automation decisions
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes Event-Driven Ansible, an automation engine that listens to your system’s event stream and reacts to events that you have specified with targeted automation tasks. In this way, Event-Driven Ansible manages routine automation tasks and responses, freeing you up to work on more complex tasks.
Managed through Event-Driven Ansible controller, Ansible rulebooks are the framework for automation decisions. Ansible rulebooks are collections of rulesets, which in turn consist of one or more sources, rules, and conditions. Rulebooks tell the system what events to flag and how to respond to them. From the Automation Decisions section of the platform user interface, you can use rulebooks to connect and listen to event sources, and define actions that are triggered in response to certain events.
Additional resources
For more information about rulebook, events, and sources, see Rulebook actions.
1.5. Automation mesh
Automation mesh is an overlay network intended to ease the distribution of automation across a collection of execution nodes using existing connectivity. Execution nodes are where Ansible Playbooks are actually executed. A node runs an automation execution environment which, in turn, runs the Ansible Playbook. Automation mesh creates peer-to-peer connections between these execution nodes, increasing the resiliency of your automation workloads to network latency and connection disruptions. This also permits more flexible architectures and provides rapid, independent scaling of control and execution capacity.
1.6. Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed
Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant is a generative AI service designed by and for Ansible platform engineers and developers. It accepts natural-language prompts entered by a user and then interacts with IBM watsonx foundation models to produce code recommendations built on Ansible best practices.
Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant helps automation teams learn, create, and maintain Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform content more efficiently.
1.7. Product Notification Feed
Effective July 2025, the Ansible Automation Platform RSS notification feed will be available. This feed serves as a method for communicating various product updates and changes to customers.
Customers can subscribe to the notifications by visiting announcements.ansiblecloud.redhat.com/feed.atom through an RSS feed reader. This feed is updated with events such as Ansible Automation Platform upgrades and system maintenance.
All Ansible Automation Platform customers can subscribe to this content. Messages include categorization tags to specify deployment types: managed, self-managed (on-prem), or a combination. Red Hat is developing a future enhancement to integrate this feature directly into the UI.
1.8. Ansible development tools
Ansible development tools are an integrated and supported suite of capabilities that help IT practitioners at any skill level generate automation content faster than they might with manual coding. Ansible development tools can help you create, test, and deploy automation content like playbooks, execution environments, and collections quickly and accurately using recommended practices. For more information on how Ansible development tools can help you create automation content, see our documentation on Developing automation content.
1.9. Ansible Automation Platform installation and configuration
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers flexible installation and configuration options. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can install Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform using one of the following methods, based on your environment:
1.10. Dashboard components
After you install Ansible Automation Platform on your system and log in for the first time, familiarize yourself with the platform dashboard.
- Quick starts
- You can learn about Ansible automation functions with guided tutorials called quick starts. In the dashboard, you can access quick starts by selecting a quick start card. From the panel displayed, click and complete the onscreen instructions. You can also filter quick starts by keyword and status.
- Resource status
- Indicates the status of your hosts, projects, and inventories. The status indicator links to your configured hosts, projects and inventories where you can search, filter, add and change these resources.
- Job Activity
- You can view a summary of your current job status. Filter the job status within a period of time or by job type, or click to view a complete list of jobs that are currently available.
- Jobs
- You can view recent jobs that have run, or click to view a complete list of jobs that are currently available, or create a new job.
- Projects
- You can view recently updated projects or click to view a complete list of the projects that are currently available, or create a new project.
- Inventories
- You can view recently updated inventories or click to view a complete list of available inventories, or create a new inventory.
- Rulebook Activations
- You can view the list of recent rulebook activations and their status, display the complete list of rulebook activations that are currently available, or create a new rulebook activation.
- Rule Audit
- You view recently fired rule audits, view rule audit records, and view rule audit data based on corresponding rulebook activation runs.
- Decision Environments
- You can view recently updated decision environments, or click to view a complete list of available inventories, or create a new decision environment.
1.11. Using this guide
After you have installed Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 and have become familiar with the dashboard, use this document to explore further options for setup and daily use. This guide is structured so that you can select the path that is most appropriate to you and your role within your organization. We also encourage you to explore the other paths outlined in this guide to learn how Ansible empowers users with various roles and objectives to build and customize automation tasks.
Select one of the following paths to continue getting started:
- If you are a systems administrator configuring authentication and setting up teams and organizations, see Getting started as a platform administrator.
- If you are a developer setting up development environments, creating playbooks, rulebooks, roles, or projects, see Getting started as an automation developer.
- If you are an operator using playbooks, publishing custom content, creating projects, and creating and using inventories, see Getting started as an automation operator.
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