Ansible vs. Kubernetes: how they work together

Ansible and Kubernetes are open source platforms that serve different roles in automating IT environments, and which can be used separately or together. 

Ansible's main goal is to automate repetitive IT processes across infrastructure components. Kubernetes, meanwhile, is designed to orchestrate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications—making it possible to run software at scale in hybrid environments. These goals are complementary in modern IT environments, and it’s common to use both Ansible and Kubernetes together.

Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift® are enterprise-grade solutions built on top of Ansible and Kubernetes, respectively. They enhance the core functionality of these tools and provide additional features for large-scale, mission-critical deployments. 

Learn about automating in the cloud

Ansible is an open source automation engine designed to simplify tasks such as system provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and other various IT processes. 

Systems administrators and other IT professionals use it to automate the setup and deployment of new systems across diverse environments, such as cloud or on-premise. Ansible ensures that systems maintain a desired configuration, such as keeping software packages up to date. For example, a company might use Ansible to deploy a consistent application stack across hundreds of servers, ensuring system efficiency.

According to Ansible community documentation, Ansible is designed to be:

1. Agentless: It avoids installation of additional software across IT infrastructure, easing deployment.
2. Simple: Ansible Playbooks are written in YAML, a plain language that simplifies code readability.
3. Scalable and flexible: Its modular design supports various operating systems, enabling scalable automation.
4. Idempotent and predictable: It runs modules repeatedly without altering the desired state.

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. 

A container houses an application's code, configuration, and dependencies to run it as an isolated process. Each application runs in its own container or multiple containers, which are organized into pods. A working Kubernetes deployment is called a cluster, which is a group of hosts running containers. 

One of Kubernetes’s key advantages is it works on many different kinds of infrastructure, anything from bare metal servers to complex hybrid cloud environments.

Kubernetes is built on 3 core design principles. According to the Kubernetes implementation details, a Kubernetes deployment should be:

1. Secure: It should follow the latest security best-practices.
2. User-friendly: It should be operable using a few simple commands.
3. Extendable: It shouldn’t favor one provider and should be customizable from a configuration file.

Read more about Kubernetes architecture

While Kubernetes excels at orchestrating containerized workloads, customers typically need to introduce additional tools for infrastructure provisioning, application lifecycle management, and multi-cluster support. Manually managing these tasks can be overwhelming and increases the risk of human error. Ansible addresses these challenges by automating cluster provisioning, enforcing configurations, and managing application deployments across Kubernetes environments. By pairing Ansible with Kubernetes, organizations can combine the strengths of both—taking advantage of Ansible’s library of modules, human-readable playbooks, and support for complex tasks like virtual machine migration. This integration can bridge key operational gaps, and make Kubernetes environments more scalable, consistent, and easier to manage over time.

Ansible and Kubernetes are great starting points for automating configuration management and orchestrating containerized applications for smaller-scale deployments. However, for large-scale operations, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform offer more comprehensive and reliable solutions. Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, and pairing it with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform extends automation across your infrastructure and applications to extend management and security capabilities. Deploying Ansible Automation Platform within Red Hat OpenShift via OperatorHub is the easiest way to get started on installation and lifecycle management. 

After installing Ansible Automation Platform on Red Hat OpenShift, you can use the platforms together to:

• Automate the creation, deployment, and management of Red Hat OpenShift clusters.
• Coordinate existing off-cluster infrastructure with cloud-native infrastructure and services.
• Support deployment, scaling, and application updates reliably from 1 common framework.
• Migrate and manage virtual machines (VMs) consistently and provision them for public or private cloud solutions.
• Establish end-to-end business-continuity and disaster-recovery automation for Red Hat OpenShift clusters.

Because both Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift use YAML, teams with experience in either platform can quickly get started. This shared foundation lets OpenShift admins create Ansible Playbooks and enables automation developers to manage and deploy clusters more efficiently.

Other ways to use Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift together:

Ansible Kubernetes Collection

The Ansible Kubernetes Collection provides modules that enable users to automate tasks like deploying applications to Kubernetes clusters, managing resources such as pods, services, and deployments, and interacting with the Kubernetes application programming interface (API). For instance, you can automate the deployment of microservices across a Kubernetes cluster using Ansible Playbooks.

Ansible OpenShift Collection

The Ansible OpenShift Collection simplifies the automation of Red Hat OpenShift clusters, which are built on Kubernetes architecture. With it, you can automate tasks such as managing OpenShift projects, scaling applications, and handling OpenShift resources.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is a tool that provides centralized management of multiple OpenShift clusters. It enables administrators to deploy, configure, and monitor applications across clusters. Combined with Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can be used to automate tasks across a large number of clusters.

Kubernetes and Event-Driven Ansible

Event-Driven Ansible allows for dynamic, real-time responses to events within a system. Integrating Event-Driven Ansible with Kubernetes allows for automated reactions to events in a Kubernetes cluster, such as scaling pods when traffic spikes, or deploying new versions of an application when code is pushed to the repository. This integration enhances the agility and resilience of Kubernetes-managed environments.

Why use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform with OpenShift  

Red Hat is a leader and active builder of open source technology, including Ansible and Kubernetes, and creates essential tools for securing, simplifying, and automatically updating your IT infrastructure.

With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, you can create, manage, and scale automation across the enterprise, with the capabilities to manage dozens of IT automation use cases—including provisioning, configuration management, cloud, and virtualization. 

Learn more about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

With Red Hat OpenShift, which is built on a Kubernetes foundation, you can make new containerized apps, host them, and deploy them in the cloud with the scalability, control, and orchestration that can turn a good idea into new business quickly and easily.

Learn more about Red Hat OpenShift