What is the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform automation controller?

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform is a subscription that offers all the tools, services, and training needed to implement enterprise-wide automation. It includes the automation controller as a core component, allowing users to define, operate, scale, and delegate automation across their enterprise.

Automation controller is the control plane for automation, and includes a user interface, browsable API, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications, graphical inventory management, CI/CD integrations, and workflow visualizer functions.

Manage inventory, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate into reporting, all from a centralized user interface and REST API.

Automation controller introduces a distributed, modular architecture with a decoupled control and execution plane. This enables teams to scale and deliver automation with reduced overhead and increased velocity.

Automation operators need ancillary tools to deploy and manage dependencies across separate Ansible Automation Platform instances for consistent automation execution. These dependencies can include Python packages, Python versions, frameworks, and Ansible Automation Platform content.

Automation controller’s distributed architecture enables automation operators to deploy instances over diverse platforms and scale automation rapidly to meet growing volume demands.

When automation is scalable it allows you to create and launch as many jobs as needed to accomplish your automation goals.

The automation controller also supports automation execution environments. Execution environments are self-contained images in which all automation runs, containing Ansible Automation Platform content and any additional dependencies.

Automation execution environments help to ensure that automation runs consistently across multiple platforms. All custom dependencies are defined at the development phase and are no longer tightly coupled to the control plane, resulting in faster development cycles, reliability, and portability across environments.

Automation execution environments improve the administration experience for automation developers and administrators and give you the ability to scale automation across your organization.

Continue reading about execution environments

Automation controller centralizes and controls your Ansible Automation Platform infrastructure. The dashboard provides a visual display of everything going on in your environment, helping you to understand and record what changes were made, by whom, and when to support compliance policies. It also includes intuitive filters that automation operators can use to display concise information relevant to the task at hand.

Automation controller’s user interface includes distinct "view" and "edit" perspectives for controller objects and components, enabling better observability. 

A strict content security policy has been added to the automation controller as an additional layer of protection that detects and mitigates common cybersecurity threats.

The automation controller now also features the automation topology viewer, which allows users to graphically visualize even the most complex automation topologies—including hop, execution, hybrid, and control nodes—across multiple sites.

The automation topology viewer simplifies IT operations teams' ability to better support and troubleshoot more complex automation execution topologies. This new tool gives users a clearer picture of where their automation is running, making it even easier to manage at scale with Ansible Automation Platform.

Automation controller features:

• Task manager and scheduler
• API inventory management
• API credential management
• API automation job management
• Automation topology viewer
• Message, queue, cache, and KV store
• Automation mesh connector
• Automation mesh receptor
• Database

When implementing automation across the enterprise, IT organizations need a standardized way to define and embed automation workflows into other tools and processes, reliable and scalable execution of automation, and a centralized system that enables auditing.  

By standardizing how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, Ansible Automation Platform allows enterprises to automate with confidence and reduce automation sprawl and variance across the enterprise.

Learn more about Ansible Automation Platform