pyinfra is a python-native, agentless automation tool that runs commands over ssh — concurrently, idempotently, and 6× faster than ansible.

Using Ansible content that depends on non-default dependencies can be tricky. Packages must be installed on each node, play nicely with other software installed on the host system, and be kept in sync.

To help simplify this process, we have introduced the concept of Execution Environments, which you can create with Ansible Builder.

Ansible Builder is a tool that automates the process of building execution environments using the schemas and tooling defined in various Ansible Collections and by the user.

Hello and welcome to another introductory Ansible blog post, where we'll be covering a new command-line interface (CLI) tool, Ansible Builder. Please note that this article will cover some intermediate-level topics such as containers (Ansible Builder uses Podman by default), virtual environments, and Ansible Content Collections. If you have some familiarity with those topics, then read on to find out what Ansible Builder is, why it was developed, and how to use it. 

This project is currently in development upstream on GitHub and is not yet part of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product.  As with all Red Hat software, our code is open and we have an open source development model for our enterprise software.  The goal of this blog post is to show the current status of this initiative, and start getting the community and customers comfortable with our methodologies, thought process, and concept of Execution Environments.  Feedback on this upstream project can be provided on GitHub via comments and issues, or provided via the various methods listed on our website.  There is also a great talk on AnsibleFest.com, titled “Creating and Using Ansible Execution Environments,” available on-demand, which can provide additional clarification.

s part of a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription, customers have access to supported versions of on-premise packages, as well as hosted services provided on console.redhat.com. Red Hat provides a published product life cycle for Ansible Automation Platform so that customers and partners can properly plan, deploy, support, and maintain their on-premise automation clusters as well as hosted services that they use as part of the Ansible Automation Platform subscription.

This life cycle encompasses stated time periods for each version of Ansible Automation Platform, which is a logical grouping of many individual product components. The life cycle for each version of Ansible Automation Platform is split into production phases, each identifying the various levels of maintenance over a period of time from the initial release date. While multiple versions of Ansible Automation Platform may be supported at any one time, note that this life cycle applies to each specific version of Ansible Automation Platform and does not apply to (for example) the 1.x or 2.x major version as a whole. That is, semantic versioning rules are not used as part of Ansible Automation Platform releases (but specific contained components may).

Customers are expected to upgrade their Ansible Automation Platform environments to the most current supported version of the product in a timely fashion. Features and bug fixes target only the latest versions of the product, though some allowance may be given for high security risk items.

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

Network automation to screen-scraping devices is primarily concerned with gathering output from show commands and with making configuration changes.

Netmiko aims to accomplish both of these operations and to do it across a very broad set of platforms. It seeks to do this while abstracting away low-level state control (i.e. eliminate low-level regex pattern matching to the extent practical).

Nornir is an automation framework written in python to be used with python. Most automation frameworks hide the language they are written in by using some cumbersome pseudo-language which usually is almost Turing complete, but lacks tooling to debug and troubleshoot. Integrating with other systems is also usually quite hard as they usually have complex APIs if any at all. Some of the other common problems of those pseudo-languages is that are usually quite bad at dealing with data and re-usability is limited.

Nornir aims to solve those problems by providing a pure python framework. Just imagine Nornir as the Flask of automation. Nornir will take care of dealing with the inventory where you have your host information, it will take care of dispatching the tasks to your devices and will provide a common framework to write “plugins”.

OpenSource-Tools for network and automation - Eine kleine Reise durch den Zoo - Falk Stern

We’ve spent the last two years automating and improving our migration process to address key issues we were having — manual intervention, backwards compatibility, correctness, and performance. This post dives into the problems we ran into and highlights some learnings and tools we made along the way.

NAPALM (Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support) is a Python library that implements a set of functions to interact with different network device Operating Systems using a unified API.

NAPALM supports several methods to connect to the devices, to manipulate configurations or to retrieve data.

InSpec is compliance as code – a human-readable language for automating the continuous testing and compliance auditing of your entire infrastructure. You can also use it to verify if your servers and applications are configured correctly.

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.
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Learn about Ansible -- a radically simple way to deploy applications, configure operating systems, and orchestrate IT operations including zero downtime rolling updates. Let's bring about SkyNet faster.

Oz is a tool for automatically installing operating systems into files with only minimal up-front input from the user.

For each type of guest operating system, Oz supports up to three operations: operating system installation, operating system customization, and ICICLE (manifest generation). More information about these operations is available on the Oz Architecture page

Michael DeHaan started the Ansible project because he realized that past attempts to automate IT had only moved complexity into other areas. Instead of making the lives of developers and sysadmins easier, we were now managing the management systems with a messy combination of custom code, heavyweight agents and point solutions. And none of these tools were built for the cloud. There had to be a simpler way.

In PART 2, we are going to look at how to write simple playbooks, specifically we will learn about: Tasks, Handlers, Roles, Templates and Variables

For this scenario, the playbook that we are going to create will simply install and configure Apache web server (httpd) on the remote host. The main purpose of this tutorial however is to learn how to write playbooks effectively and correctly. So without further adieu, lets get started!

Ansible is a really powerful and useful tool when it comes to automating IT infrastructure. It is an easy to use configuration management system that can be used to automate and organize your system configuration tasks for a large network of computers.

[Eric T] wrote up his insanely-comprehensive home automation setup. What started out as a method to notify him when his dog barked grew into a whole-house, Arduino-powered sensor extravaganza. We’ve previously looked at two different steps from this mammoth article. One automated his dog, the other focused on the Wink hub to bridge with commercial hardware like smart lightbulbs. Now let’s look at the project as a whole.