Chapter 1. Ansible development workspaces

Ansible development workspaces offer centralized management and policy enforcement. Administrators gain improved control, trust, and governance over the consistent, secure environments used to develop automation. Developers do not need to install applications on their workstations, which is useful for locked down environments.

Ansible development tools and runtimes are pre-configured in Ansible development workspaces. Developers can start creating projects for automation content quickly by logging in to Ansible development workspaces in a browser.

The development tools in Ansible development workspaces are based on Ansible recommended practices, which improves the quality and reliability of your automation content. As a component of your Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription, Ansible development workspaces are fully supported.

To ensure that your automation content files persist when you quit Ansible development workspaces, you push your projects to a git repository in a source control manager (SCM) that is linked to your workspace.

Each Ansible development workspace is a project-agnostic full development environment. Dependencies are satisfied for all the tools in the environment.

The following applications are pre-installed.

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces is a containerized cloud development environment (CDE) that provides pre-configured, consistent workspaces running on OpenShift Container Platform. It provisions ready-to-code workspaces on demand.

The Ansible dev spaces image is the container image for Ansible development workspaces. It replaces an existing Ansible demo within OpenShift Dev Spaces and is fully supported by Red Hat.

For details for the Ansible devspaces image, see the Ansible Automation Platform devspaces image page in the All containers section of the Red Hat Ecosystem catalog.

The following diagram illustrates the relationship between OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Dev Spaces, and Ansible development workspaces.