Chapter 4. Operator topologies

The following diagram outlines the infrastructure topology that Red Hat has tested with this deployment model that customers can use when self-managing Ansible Automation Platform:

Figure 4.1. Infrastructure topology diagram

A Single Node OpenShift (SNO) cluster has been tested with the following requirements: 32 GB RAM, 16 CPUs, 128 GB local disk, and 3000 IOPS.

Red Hat has tested the following configurations to install and run Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform:

Use the following example custom resource (CR) to add your Ansible Automation Platform instance to your project:

apiVersion: aap.ansible.com/v1alpha1
kind: AnsibleAutomationPlatform
metadata:
  name: <aap instance name>
spec:
  eda:
    automation_server_ssl_verify: 'no'
  hub:
    storage_type: 's3'
    object_storage_s3_secret: '<name of the Secret resource holding s3 configuration>'

Ansible Automation Platform’s performance characteristics and capacity are impacted by its resource allocation and configuration. With OpenShift, each Ansible Automation Platform component is deployed as a pod. You can specify resource requests and limits for each pod.

Use the Ansible Automation Platform Custom Resource (CR) to configure resource allocation for OpenShift installations. Each configurable item has default settings. These settings are the minimum requirements for an installation, but might not meet your production workload needs.

By default, each component’s deployments are set for minimum resource requests but no resource limits. OpenShift only schedules the pods with available resource requests, but the pods are allowed to consume unlimited RAM or CPU provided that the OpenShift worker node itself is not under node pressure.

In the Operator growth topology, Ansible Automation Platform is deployed on a Single Node OpenShift (SNO) with 32 GB RAM, 16 CPUs, 128 GB Local disk, and 3000 IOPS. This is not a shared environment, so Ansible Automation Platform pods have full access to all of the compute resources of the OpenShift SNO. In this scenario, the capacity calculation for the automation controller task pods is derived from the underlying OpenShift Container Platform node that runs the pod. It does not have access to the entire node. This capacity calculation influences how many concurrent jobs automation controller can run.

OpenShift manages storage distinctly from VMs. This impacts how automation hub stores its artifacts. In the Operator growth topology, we use S3 storage because automation hub requires a ReadWriteMany type storage, which is not a default storage type in OpenShift.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses several ports to communicate with its services. These ports must be open and available for incoming connections to the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform server for it to work. Ensure that these ports are available and are not blocked by the server firewall.

The following diagram outlines the infrastructure topology that Red Hat has tested with this deployment model that customers can use when self-managing Ansible Automation Platform:

Figure 4.2. Infrastructure topology diagram

The following infrastructure topology describes an OpenShift Cluster with 3 master nodes and 2 worker nodes.

Each OpenShift Worker node has been tested with the following component requirements: 16 GB RAM, 4 CPUs, 128 GB local disk, and 3000 IOPS.

Red Hat has tested the following configurations to install and run Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform:

Ansible Automation Platform’s performance characteristics and capacity are impacted by its resource allocation and configuration. With OpenShift, each Ansible Automation Platform component is deployed as a pod. You can specify resource requests and limits for each pod.

Use the Ansible Automation Platform custom resource to configure resource allocation for OpenShift installations. Each configurable item has default settings. These settings are the exact configuration used within the context of this reference deployment architecture and presumes that the environment is being deployed and managed by an Enterprise IT organization for production purposes.

By default, each component’s deployments are set for minimum resource requests but no resource limits. OpenShift only schedules the pods with available resource requests, but the pods are allowed to consume unlimited RAM or CPU provided that the OpenShift worker node itself is not under node pressure.

In the Operator enterprise topology, Ansible Automation Platform is deployed on a Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) Hosted Control Plane (HCP) cluster with 2 t3.xlarge worker nodes spread across 2 AZs within a single AWS Region. This is not a shared environment, so Ansible Automation Platform pods have full access to all of the compute resources of the ROSA HCP cluster. In this scenario, the capacity calculation for the automation controller task pods is derived from the underlying HCP worker node that runs the pod. It does not have access to the CPU or memory resources of the entire node. This capacity calculation influences how many concurrent jobs automation controller can run.

OpenShift manages storage distinctly from VMs. This impacts how automation hub stores its artifacts. In the Operator enterprise topology, we use S3 storage because automation hub requires a ReadWriteMany type storage, which is not a default storage type in OpenShift. Externally provided Redis, PostgreSQL, and object storage for automation hub are specified. This provides the Ansible Automation Platform deployment with additional scalability and reliability features, including specialized backup, restore, and replication services and scalable storage.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform uses several ports to communicate with its services. These ports must be open and available for incoming connections to the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform server for it to work. Ensure that these ports are available and are not blocked by the server firewall.