Top 10 Ansible blogs 2022

Introduction

If you're looking to brush up on the most popular Ansible information from 2022 (or just grasping at any excuse to break away from your relatives for a few minutes during the holidays), you've come to the right place. What follows are the top 10 blogs that have captured the most attention from Ansible.com readers in 2022. 

10. Introducing the Event-Driven Ansible developer preview

One of the buzzworthy announcements at AnsibleFest 2022 was Event-Driven Ansible, released as Developer Preview by Red Hat. In this blog, Joe Pisciotta, Ansible Product Manager, describes Event-Driven Ansible's integration with 3rd-party event sources and support for establishing rules using "if-then" scenarios. Discover why Event-Driven Ansible makes remediating issues simple and removes the time-consuming customization usually required with "self-healing" approaches. 

9. What's new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.3

Several new features and enhancements were announced as part of Ansible Automation Platform 2.3, such as more flexibility and control over execution nodes in automation mesh, the launch of Ansible validated content to help you get started automating operational tasks, support for LDAP with RBAC, and much more. Sean Cavanaugh, Ansible Technical Marketing Manager, outlines the capabilities of these new enhancements in detail. 

8. Peeling back the layers and understanding automation mesh

Automation mesh helps organizations easily scale automation anywhere–from a single site to a global network footprint, including at the edge. This allows automation to run more consistently and closer to the devices that need it (boosting performance) while managing it centrally. In this blog, Sean walks through the process for installing automation mesh, correctly configuring control and execution nodes, authenticating your automation mesh network, and managing network and firewall policies. 

7. Getting Started with Event-Driven Ansible

Nuno Martins, Ansible Technical Marketing Manager, walks through a simple but practical exercise for installing and building your first Event-Driven Ansible rulebook (not to be confused with an Ansible Playbook). After learning how to define sources, rules, and actions, you'll be planning how you're going to spend all the extra free time you've found in your day. 

6. Terraforming clouds with Ansible

Nuno is back to deliver an important message that many users will be relieved to hear: Terraform and Ansible work very well together. Learn how to recycle your existing Terraform provisioning manifest files while using Ansible to trigger workflows and tackle post-provisioning tasks like workload deployment, compliance management, and more. 

5. Using Ansible and Packer, From Provisioning to Orchestration

If you've ever taken an Ansible self-paced lab, you know how quickly you're inside an Ansible lab environment after login–all through your Web browser. Sean shows us how “the sausage gets made” using Ansible to provision, install, and set up the lab environments and the open source tool, Packer, to package the machine images and load everything quickly. 

4. Walking on clouds with Ansible

In this blog from November, Nuno announced the release of the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for Terraform, which allows you to bring your existing Terraform provisioning workloads into Ansible Automation Platform. Discover how the new modules can help you retain the provisioning features of Terraform while using the configuration management and orchestration capabilities of Ansible to automate more efficiently. 

3. What's new in Ansible Automation Platform 2.2

Red Hat Summit 2022 seems like a long time ago, but with it came a host of new Ansible Automation Platform features, including automation topology viewer to help visualize how automation nodes are connected, new content signing capabilities for greater trust, new developer and content creation tools, and more.  

2. Deep dive on Ansible VS Code extension

One of the many Ansible content creator features and integrations is the Ansible VS Code extension, which supports Ansible auto-completion and integrates with quality assurance tools like ansible-lint, Ansible syntax check, yamllint, molecule, and ansible-test. In this blog, Ganesh Nalawade shares how the extension works, then walks through initial installation, set up, as well as working with automation execution environments. 

1. Ansible vs. Terraform Demystified

By now you've already noticed that Sean Cavanaugh contributed 4 out of the top 10 blogs to make our list this year. In the most popular blog of 2022, Sean compares Terraform and Ansible in detail, and offers recommendations to make them work together. Be sure to also check out a related and expanded version of this blog  Ansible vs Terraform, clarified

Want even more Ansible? 
 
Join: Event-Driven Ansible office hours in January
Watch: Virtual AnsibleFest 2022 sessions
Try: Ansible Automation Platform free for 60 days


About the author

Tricia McConnell is Principal Product Marketing Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. She brings more than twenty years of experience marketing technical solutions to enterprise IT audiences. 

Read full bio