As the technology landscape continues to evolve, the latest release of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for amazon.aws introduces a suite of powerful modules that redefine the boundaries of automation within Amazon Web Services (AWS) while redefining how organizations approach security deployments and seamless migrations within the AWS ecosystem. In our previous blog post, "What's New: Cloud Automation with amazon.aws 7.0.0," we presented the latest release, outlining the changes, new features and newly supported modules. In this blog post, we embark on an exploration of two in ..read more

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the certified amazon.aws Ansible Content Collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings a number of enhancements to improve the overall user experience and speed up the process from development to production. This blog post goes through changes and highlights what’s new in the 7.0.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection. We have included numerous features, plugins, bug fixes, and code quality improvements that further enhance the amazon.aws collection. Let's go through some of them!  ..read more

Integrating observability tools with automation is paramount in the realm of modern IT operations, as it fosters a symbiotic relationship between visibility and efficiency. Observability tools provide deep insights into the performance, health, and behavior of complex systems, enabling organizations to proactively identify and rectify issues before they escalate.  When seamlessly integrated with automation frameworks, these tools empower businesses to not only monitor but also respond to dynamic changes in real time. This synergy between observability and automation enables IT teams to sw ..read more

Over time, application owners find themselves compelled to continuously refine their applications and the underlying infrastructure to enhance the products they deliver, whether to internal or external customers. These modifications inevitably lead to changes in the configuration of both applications and infrastructure. While some of these changes may be benign, others can unintentionally steer the systems away from their securely configured state, a phenomenon commonly referred to as "configuration drift." Left unaddressed, the extent of this drift can introduce substantial risks to the organ ..read more

Infrastructure automation is an area where systems administrators and  IT operations teams can see some of the biggest benefits from automation, including time savings, reducing tedious manual work, and improving the overall health of their systems. In this blog, I've identified the top 5 infrastructure automation use cases for Ansible Automation Platform that you can deploy in your own environment, and I've incorporated new capabilities like Event-Driven Ansible to make managing your infrastructure even easier.    Provisioning Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Ansible Automation P ..read more

The use of Event-Driven Ansible to enable fact gathering from events is considered a “Getting Started” type of use case, but it can be extremely powerful. This use case is simple and it is what we consider a “Read Only” type of action, meaning that we are not making any changes, but we are using the event to trigger a fact gathering process which we can later publish to the IT Service Management system.  The benefit with this is we are able to provide consistent automated troubleshooting and fact gathering which is used to enrich the ticketing systems, so when our engineers have a look a ..read more

CVE-2023-20198  Reference: https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-iosxe-webui-privesc-j22SaA4z Overview Cisco recently published an advisory pertaining to an active exploitation of a previously unknown vulnerability in the web UI feature of Cisco IOS XE Software when exposed to the internet or to untrusted networks. This vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account on an affected system with privilege level 15 access. The attacker can then use that account to gain control of the affected system.   Recomm ..read more

This blog is co-authored by Tomas Znamenacek and Hicham (he-sham) Mourad   Introduction We’re so excited to introduce you to the newest addition to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure – The new landing page! Now with new deployments, a single web page that consolidates all you need to know about Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, how to get started, as well as links to the Ansible Automation Platform applications, is now accessible. Upon arriving at this getting started landing page, you will see three tiles on the overview page. You have the ability to launch each o ..read more

Event-Driven Ansible became generally available in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4. As part of the release, Red Hat Insights and Ansible teams collaborated to implement and certify a Red Hat Insights collection integrating Insights events as a source of events for Ansible Automation Platform. This provides a consistent way to receive and handle events triggered from Insights to drive and track automation within the Ansible Automation Platform. The collection is available for installation on Ansible automation hub. In this article, we explore how to get, configure and use the Red Hat Insights ..read more

Introduction Ansible validated content is a set of collections containing pre-built YAML content (such as playbooks or roles) to address the most common automation use cases. You can use Ansible validated content out-of-the-box or as a learning opportunity to develop your automation skills. It's a trusted starting point to bootstrap your automation: use it, customize it and learn from it! This content is curated by experts like the Red Hat Automation Community of Practice so: Use cases are based on successfully deployed customer examples Content creators are trusted and verified subject matte ..read more