Red Hat Security: Linux in Physical, Virtual, and Cloud

Effective automation tools help you manage security by ensuring all machines are correctly and consistently configured and patched.

Red Hat Ansible Automation is a good choice as an automation tool because it is simple to use, its automation instructions are easy to read, and a number of security tools provide Ansible Playbooks to help remediate issues.

An Ansible Playbook consists of one or more plays. Each play targets a set of hosts with a list of tasks, executed in order, and checks to see whether the system is in a certain state. If it is not, it puts the system in that state.

You use the ansible-playbook command to run an Ansible Playbook.

An ad hoc command is a simple, one-task command that you can run using the ansible command without writing a playbook.

An inventory file lists the hosts and groups that you can use in your playbook and with ad hoc commands.

Red Hat Ansible Tower is a service that helps you control, secure, and centrally manage your Ansible automation at scale.

You can use Red Hat Ansible Tower to protect the authentication credentials of hosts from users while still allowing them to use them to run playbooks.

Red Hat Ansible Tower provides central logging and management so that you can track who ran playbooks from the Ansible Tower server, at what time, affecting what hosts, and what the results were of those runs.