With Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform 2.x, one of the big change is the introduction of Ansible Execution Environment.

Then questions rise;
* What is an Ansible Execution Environment?
* What is it for?

What is an Ansible Automation Execution Environment?

Below is a simple diagram summarising what it is.

It is an optimised container environment that contains required “binaries”, “python+other Libraries” and ansible collections to execute an Ansible playbook(s).

Business/Technical Problems to solve:
– To Provide a simplified & consistent execution environment to enhance automation development experiences

When a developer/user develops automation on their own environment and shares their own ansible playbooks with other team members, depending on their own development environment vs others, the automation experience could be very different. (Developing Ansible playbooks in a Mac vs Linux)

By creating and using the Ansible Automation Execution Environment, it provides the same development/execution experience.

– Multiple python environments to manage that creates maintenance overhead.

One of the main struggles was that Ansible Tower users had requirements for multiple python virtual environments as the number of users or number of use cases increased. E.g. for use cases, requirements of python 2.7 vs python 3.x or some modules requiring specific versions of python modules.

Above has resulted, within Ansible tower creating multiple python virtual environments, and if you have a cluster of ansible tower nodes, the administrator had to ensure all tower nodes have exactly the same python virtual environment configurations.