Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

An automation execution environment is a container image that includes Ansible Content Collections, their software dependencies, and a minimal Ansible engine that can run your playbooks.

By using an automation execution environment, you can use the same portable environment to develop your Ansible Playbooks on one system and run them on another. This streamlines and simplifies the development process and helps to ensure predictable, reproducible results.

The automation execution environment is where your Ansible Playbook runs. You normally use a tool such as ansible-navigator to run a playbook, but the playbook runs inside the container rather than directly on your system.

An automation execution environment consists of the following components:

Automation execution environments are prepared by the execution environment builder (ansible-builder), and can be pushed to any container registry.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 provides three prebuilt automation execution environments:

The minimal automation execution environment only includes the ansible.builtin Ansible Content Collection. You usually reserve it as a starting point to build custom automation execution environments.

The supported automation execution environment includes some collections that Red Hat supports. Automation content navigator and automation controller use the supported automation execution environment by default. Use this automation execution environment with your new playbooks.

The compatibility automation execution environment is based on Ansible 2.9, which was released before modules were unbundled from the core Ansible package into collections. This is useful when you want to run playbooks written for Ansible 2.9 (or Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 1.2) that you have not yet migrated to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.

Red Hat hosts those three automation execution environments in its container registry at registry.redhat.io, under the ansible-automation-platform-22 namespace:

You can browse the registry catalog at https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/search?q=ansible-automation-platform-22.

Use automation content navigator to list and inspect the automation execution environments available on the system. To do so, run the ansible-navigator images command:

[user@host ~]$ ansible-navigator images
  Image                 Tag      Execution environment  Created         Size
0│ee-29-rhel8           latest   True                   4 months ago    815 MB
1│ee-minimal-rhel8      latest   True                   4 months ago    265 MB
2│ee-supported-rhel8    latest   True                   4 months ago    1.05 GB

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You can type the number of the automation execution environment that you want to inspect. For example, press 2 to review the details of the supported automation execution environment:

  Image: ee-supported-rhel8:latest   Description
0│Image information                  Information collected from image inspectio
1│General information                OS and python version information
2│Ansible version and collections    Information about ansible and ansible coll
3│Python packages                    Information about python and python packag
4│Operating system packages          Information about operating system package
5│Everything                         All image information

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You can view further details on a specific aspect of the automation execution environment by selecting the associated number. In the preceding example, if you press 2 or enter :2, then you get the list of the available collections in that automation execution environment.

The ansible-navigator run command runs your playbooks in an automation execution environment.

This command uses the supported automation execution environment by default, but you can use the --execution-environment-image (or --eei) option to specify a different environment. The following example shows how to run a playbook using the compatibility automation execution environment:

[user@host ~]$ ansible-navigator run oldplaybook.yml --eei \
> registry.redhat.io/ansible-automation-platform-22/ee-29-rhel8:latest

If the container image is already available on your system, then you can use its short image name: --eei ee-29-rhel8:latest in the preceding example.

If the container image is not already available on your system, ansible-navigator tries to pull it from the container registry. Use the podman login command to ensure that you are authenticated to the registry. In the preceding example, at the beginning of your session, run the podman login registry.redhat.io command and provide your Customer Portal credentials to authenticate to the registry.

You can control how ansible-navigator pulls container images by using the --pull-policy (or --pp) option with one of the following arguments: