Automation controller

Automation controller is the command and control center for Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, replacing Ansible Tower. It includes a webUI, API, role-based access control (RBAC), a workflow visualizer, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) integrations to help you organize and manage automation across your enterprise.

Automation controller brings a systematic approach to automation with Ansible Automation Platform. By standardizing how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, it allows enterprises to automate with confidence, while reducing sprawl and variance across IT environments.

Automation controller is the central location to configure and manage how automation runs across your infrastructure. It helps you build job templates to standardize how automation is deployed, initiated, and delegated, making it more reusable and consistent. Job templates—often referred to simply as automation jobs—define how your automation runs by combining Ansible Playbooks with controller objects, which include execution environments, projects, inventories, and credentials.

• Execution environments are how you define execution environment configuration and sources—such as private automation hub—providing a portable and maintainable environment for consistent automation execution throughout development and production.
• Projects are logical collections of playbooks that define your automation content sources. In other words, they’re how you add automation content to automation controller. Projects support multiple source types, source control management, RBAC, and integration with Red Hat Insights.
• Inventories allow you to define and logically group your target endpoints, such as servers, cloud instances, and security appliances. Automation controller uses native and custom plugins to dynamically divide inventories into groups of endpoints. 
• Credentials are what you need to access and authenticate with external resources, repositories, or target endpoints. Users and teams can use credentials via RBAC controls—without access to the actual credential—and automation controller stores credentials to help secure resource and endpoint access. 

Automation controller’s webUI dashboard allows you to manage and track the execution of automation jobs. It’s where you build workflows, launch job templates, view jobs as they are running, inspect the details of a specific job, and re-run a job—maintaining conditions or variables that were originally supplied when the job originally ran. The dashboard also includes intuitive filters that automation operators can use to display concise information relevant to the task at hand.

In addition to its webUI and simplified toolset, automation controller’s API is another way to scale and manage your automation. The browsable API enables seamless integration into other tools like monitoring, but also other orchestration tools like a SOAR or a CI/CD pipeline. With its flexible capabilities, automation controller allows you to manage inventory, launch and schedule workflows, track changes, and integrate into reporting—all from a centralized control plane.