Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews & Product Details

I like the simplicity of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. It doesn't require an agent on the servers, just SSH, which makes management much easier. I also appreciate that the playbooks in YAML are easy to read and maintain. Additionally, using playbooks to automate tasks eliminates repetitive tasks, allowing me to make changes on all servers at once instead of connecting to each one manually. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Performance with very large inventories can be slow. Also, the learning curve for the Automation Controller is steep for small teams. The complicated part was setting up the Automation Controller and the dynamic inventories, which took several days. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I appreciate most is how Ansible Automation Platform gives us a consistent way to automate tasks across differnet environments. Instead of everyone writing their own scripts, we can have a centralized, controlled approach that keeps things uniform and reduces errors.

Cloud services, on‑prem servers, or network devices, Ansible connects to everything without needing any agents. This flexibility has made it much easier to scale automation across the organization stacks.

Also, its write once-reuse anywhere motoo help us reuse across multiple projects or environments. This not only speeds up deployments but also ensures the same process runs the same way every time, which has noticeably improved our operational stability. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Even though YAML is readable, getting comfortable with writing playbooks, structuring roles, and understanding best practices takes time. My new team members have often needed guidance before they can contribute effectively in our platform.

May be few cases where they struggeled are role structuring, output capturing and reusing andYAML Sensitivity are more prone to error.

UI is helpful, but it introduces extra complexity compared to using Ansible alone. Managing inventories, credentials, and job templates through the controller sometimes feels more complicated than necessary.

These are just my experiences, others may feel it easy though if the have already used CFT or TF. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The automation part is very useful in Ansible specially for Linux. Being a push based tool we can use this tool as frequently we require because now we can only push the updates when required. The Customer Support is also good since the tickets from Red Hat are replied very fast Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Migration from old Ansible tower to the new Ansible version like AAP is very complex.

Since now the latest Ansible version runs on containerized Environment Engineers require to have knowledge on containerized envroinment like docker and podman Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

best feature for Linux platform as it is agentless and having complete feature required linux system upto date and vulnerable free Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The graphics need to be improved, and the overall experience requires more enhancement to match what’s available from competitors in the market. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best is the agentless architecture and human readable YAML playbooks. The platform scales from simple tasks to enterprise wide orchestration without added complexity Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Performance can be quite unpredictable at scale. For example, large inventories with complex fact gathering can cause slow execution times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I've been using AAP for quite a while. In Tower, the concept of creating a "secure bubble wrap" by utilizing virtualenvs was a great idea. However, from my world of Secrets Management, it made it near impossible to get attributes of the workload executing within to identify it without a "secret zero".

Today, in AAP... the containerized execution environments are a game changer! Now, we can determine the attributes of the environment to provide it secrets and when the execution completes -- POOF! -- the container and all secrets within are gone!

This simple change in architecture to improve modernization was an amazing advancement! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I said I was in secrets management, so you should see this one coming:

"The Single Credential Problem"

Today, Job Templates only support 1 Machine Credential. If I want to scale a job template across many hosts to patch them efficiently, there is no native way to accomplish this today. I have to utilize a workaround that employs the use of lookup plugins in the playbook and dynamically fetching secrets just-in-time based on inventory_hostname. It was actually my Lightning Talk for AnsibleFest here at Summit this week. The feature request was added to AWX in 2017.

Also, AAP has no underlying OIDC configuration. This makes it hard to utilize an identity-aware process that allows secrets management to utilize attributes of workloads (the "payload" of the JWT from OIDC) to identify them instead of a "secret zero" needing to be utilized. Cloud services and even OpenShift has this support today... a modern AAP should also support the same similar to most CI platforms out there. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AAP makes my life easier because I am a lazy engineer! If there is ever a configuration task that I have to do more than once, I use AAP to get it done. Even if I may only do something once, chances are there is a playbook for it, just incase I ever have to do it again. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The disconnect between Hashi TF and AAP. These two products are awesome when used together and a tighter integration between them is not only a need, but it is mandatory! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It runs inside containers, so the separation between control plane and execution plane gives a lot of flexibility.

The Ansible Automation Platform user experience in general is so good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No playbook viewer or editor with visual syntax validator.

More automation if you have a complete Ansible project that contains inventory, ansible.cfg, vault, roles to automate the creation of all required resources like Machine Credentials, Vault Credentials and inventory and tie them together automatically. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to run commands on infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing much, since it’s a platform that eases tasks Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like best about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is its ability to simplify complex IT tasks through consistent, agentless automation across hybrid environments. It provides a user-friendly yet powerful framework that allows teams to automate provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and more with minimal overhead. The platform’s integration with Red Hat’s enterprise ecosystem, coupled with features like role-based access control, visual dashboards, and certified content collections, makes it an ideal solution for scaling automation securely and efficiently across large organizations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It’s hard to hire employees with existing AAP knowledge Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.