Chapter 2. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform components

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.

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/

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.

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 disconnected and on-premise solutions for synchronizing automation content. You can synchronize collections and execution environment images from Red Hat cloud automation hub or other container registries, allowing you to store and serve your own custom automation. Private automation hub can also integrate into your enterprise directory and 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 enable 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. It covers 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 is the required database for Ansible Automation Platform, storing all automation data including job templates, inventory, credentials, and execution history. Understanding PostgreSQL configuration and management helps ensure optimal performance and data integrity for your automation environment.