For years and across a number of client projects now, Red Hat® Premier Partner Level Up has been using an internal tool to quick-start client proof of concept (POC) evaluations of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform® (AAP). Adopting this has already saved not only our clients, but also our own team, literally hundreds of hours across engagements already.
Today, we’re excited to share that we are open sourcing our Ansible POC Generator project under the Apache 2.0 license.
Why We Built the Ansible POC Generator
When we started leading Red Hat Ansible proof of concepts in various customer environments, one theme was constant: manually configuring AAP credentials, and inventories and job templates for each primary Ansible use case, from scratch, simply slowed down the real conversations clients wanted to have with us, starting with: “How can automation accelerate my business?”
We didn’t get into infrastructure automation to be guiding every new customer to manually click through all of the same AAP screens over and over again. And we certainly didn’t think that a heavily-manual setup was the best way to showcase an end-to-end automate-able solution as powerful as Red Hat Ansible. So we built an AAP Configuration as Code generator that now instantly:
- Bootstraps reproducible AAP configs for POC or evaluation purposes.
- Includes intuitive, sane defaults for credentials, inventories, and job templates.
- Can be reused, forked, and further customized for any AAP POC engagement.
The result? Post AAP 2.5 install, customers are running live Ansible jobs for their primary use cases, in minutes instead of hours.
The Ansible POC Generator: Field Tested
This packaged POC methodology isn’t new to Level Up’s clients, and it isn’t a side project. We’ve proven this methodology dozens of times across industries:
- Financial services companies evaluating hybrid and multicloud automation scenarios.
- Healthcare organizations accelerating their security/compliance posture.
- Media and tech companies orchestrating critical monthly security patching.
And each engagement has reinforced the same key insight: a repeatable setup is by far the fastest way to get to significant and differentiated value with Red Hat Ansible.
Why Open Source Now?
After consistent success as an internally-maintained project, we asked ourselves a simple question:
“If this accelerates our clients, why shouldn’t it accelerate everyone?”
By open sourcing this Level Up-incubated project, we hope to:
- Lower the barrier to entry for new AAP customers who want to see POC results quickly, whether they are engaging with Level Up (as a Red Hat Premier Partner which has deep specializations in Ansible) or not.
- Provide a standardized foundation for AAP POCs across the community.
- Invite potential contributions from open source practitioners who may want to extend and improve on the foundation.
What’s Included
- Templatized configurations for things like organizations, credentials, inventories, and job templates, based on primary use case (e.g., “Windows Automation”, “RHEL Patching”).
- An opinionated but flexible structure that can be quickly referenced and adapted for your environment.
- Released under an Apache 2.0 license, which means it’s free for commercial customers to use in their organizations.
How to Get Started
- Fork the repo:
https://github.com/1eve1up/ansible-poc-generator - Follow the README to bootstrap your own AAP POC environment today.
Join the Community
We’re proud of how the Ansible POC Generator has enabled our clients, and we’re excited to see what the open source community may do with it next.
👉 Check out the repo on GitHub
👉 Star it, fork it, or open an issue if you have ideas.
– The Level Up Team