Hi friends,
Exciting news! The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 is now officially available, as of September 30, 2024! This latest release introduces a host of new features and improvements designed to streamline your automation workflows and enhance efficiency across your IT infrastructure.
1. Unified Web UI - A Major Enhancement
One of the most exciting changes in Ansible Automation Platform 2.5 is the unified web UI. If you're familiar with Istio and Kubernetes, you'll appreciate how this update aggregates all API calls under a single component. This redesign means that authentication, authorization, and role-based access control (RBAC) are now managed from one place, greatly simplifying user management. Whether you're configuring controller, Automation Hub, or event-driven authentication, everything is centralized. This unified UI improves design and streamlines enterprise authentication, eliminating the need to replicate configurations across different components. This is a big step forward in making the platform easier to manage!
2. Automation Calculator – Optimize Your Automation Jobs
A new feature I'm particularly excited about is the Automation Calculator. This tool suggests ways to optimize your automation jobs and even offers insights into your ROI (Return on Investment) from using Ansible. It's going to be fascinating to see how accurate the suggestions are in real-world scenarios, especially as we push for greater efficiency in our workflows.
3. Ansible Quick Starts – Perfect for Beginners
For those just getting started with Ansible, the Ansible Quick Starts feature is perfect. This new panel in the UI guides users step by step through various tasks, helping newcomers get up to speed quickly. It’s a fantastic tool for onboarding junior engineers or anyone new to the platform.
4. Ansible Lightspeed - Generative AI for Automation
Of course, it’s 2024, and generative AI is making its way into everything—including Ansible! With this release, we get Ansible Lightspeed, powered by IBM WatsonX Code Assistant. This AI-powered tool can generate entire playbooks from a simple text prompt, explain the logic behind existing playbooks, and refine prompts for maximum clarity and correctness. It’s going to be a real game-changer for automation developers, especially since it supports on-premise deployment in air-gapped environments. I can't wait to dive into this feature.