AAP 2.7 Automation Portal and Execution Environment Builder: Visual Self-Service for Platform Engineers

At Red Hat Tech Day Netherlands (June 2026), Fred van Zuiden and Ismail Masud demonstrated AAP 2.7’s new Automation Portal — a self-service interface that transforms how platform teams build Execution Environments, manage templates, and govern automation content.

This is Platform Engineering applied to automation: give developers guardrails, not CLI commands.

The Automation Portal

The Automation Portal is a web-based interface that provides:

• Template gallery with one-click “Start” buttons
• Execution Environment Builder with visual wizard
• Collection search across Private Automation Hub and GitHub
• Governance controls built into the creation workflow

Template Gallery: Self-Service Automation

The demo showed a rich catalog of ready-to-use automation templates:

Available templates from the live demo:

Each template has a “Start” button — operators do not need to know where the playbook lives or how to configure it.

Execution Environment Builder

The headline feature: a visual wizard for building Execution Environments without touching YAML.

Why Visual EE Building Matters

• Visual authoring: Eliminates YAML syntax errors, allowing users to build consistent EEs with guided, step-by-step workflows
• Integrated Ansible Content Collections: Developers can quickly locate the collections they need within the builder experience
• Governance: Customers can add approved custom EE builder templates. Red Hat provides recommended templates for IT domain use cases
• Platform experience: Accessed directly via automation portal, making SCM and Git interactions seamless

The 4-Step Wizard

Step 1: Base Image

Choose from Red Hat-provided base images:

• Red Hat Ansible Minimal EE - Ansible Core 2.18 (RHEL 9) ★ Recommended
• Red Hat Ansible Minimal EE - Ansible Core 2.18 (RHEL 9) — channel stable2.18
• Red Hat Ansible Minimal EE - Ansible Core 2.16 (RHEL 9)
• Red Hat Ansible Minimal EE - Ansible Core 2.16 (RHEL 9) — channel stable2.16
• Custom Image — Add custom base image

Step 2: Configuration

Add collections to include in your EE definition:

The collection picker searches across:

• Private Automation Hub (rh-certified)
• GitHub

Example: Adding redhat.rhel_system_roles v1.120.5 from Private Automation Hub / rh-certified.

Advanced Configuration options:

• Customize additional Python requirements and System packages
• Include additional build steps (custom commands at any stage of container build)

Step 3: Destination and Build

Configure EE definition name, description, and tags. The definition file is generated and published automatically.

Step 4: Review

Final validation before build.

EE Definition Catalog

The portal maintains a catalog of all existing EE definitions:

Pre-built EEs in the demo environment (9 total):

Each has:

• Owner (admin)
• Tags (execution-environment)
• Actions (star, edit, delete)

Speakers Demonstrating the Portal

The live demo on interact.redhat.com showed the full flow: select template → choose base image → add collections → configure packages → build and publish.

Key Takeaways

1. No more ansible-builder CLI — Visual wizard with guardrails and governance
2. Collection discovery built-in — Search PAH + GitHub directly in the builder
3. Templates as self-service — Platform teams publish, developers consume
4. Governance by default — Approved base images, approved collections, approved templates
5. Git integration — View in Galaxy, view in GitHub, download requirements.yml

This is AAP becoming a true Internal Developer Platform for automation — abstracting away infrastructure complexity while maintaining enterprise governance.

What’s New in Event-Driven Ansible

EDA received massive updates for flexibility and control:

Event Bus Support:

• New Azure event bus just released
• New AWS event bus available
• In-flight rulebook event persistence for increased resiliency

Secrets Management:

• HashiCorp Vault, CyberArk, AWS, Azure, and others

EDA Automation Creation:

• Project synchronization with resync option on restarts
• Additional Jinja filters to replace regular expressions
• Kafka: multiple topics, extended regex, wildcards
• New event-splitter for nested events
• Rulebook concurrency key to group events by resource
• mTLS support
• Pull policy parity for decision environments

New Ansible Content Collections

Available today — delivering Efficiency, Resilience, Governance, and Scale:

Cloud Infrastructure:

• google.cloud — Cloud Build 2nd gen, Parameter Manager, Compute, Secret Manager, Storage
• azure.azcollection — Azure services: ML, App Configuration, Front Door, Storage, Arc/HCI

Security + Compliance:

• hashicorp.vault — Secrets management, OIDC, PKI, dynamic credentials, EDA integration

Networking:

• cisco.intersight — 100+ modules for Day-2 ops, firmware, and port configuration

Ansible Automation Platform:

• ansible.platform — AAP configuration-as-code, RBAC/settings refactoring, performance improvements

Observability + Incident Response:

• splunk.enterprise — Universal Forwarder lifecycle automation
• splunk.es — Enterprise Security incident workflows, response plan automation
• splunk.itsi — IT Service Intelligence with EDA integration for closed-loop remediation

Windows Patching + Management:

• microsoft.mecm — Endpoint Configuration Manager: patch orchestration, client actions, health checks
• microsoft.scom — System Center Operations Manager infrastructure + EDA alert routing
• infra.mecm_ops — Higher-level validated roles (emergency patching, health reports)
• infra.windows_ops — Windows security baseline enforcement (DISA STIG, CIS benchmarks, drift remediation)

Solution Guides: Work in Progress

Coming soon to the Solution Guides portal:

• AIOps with AWS SQS and Event-Driven Ansible — Connect Amazon SQS to EDA via CloudWatch/EventBridge
• Event-Driven Remediation with Azure Service Bus — Real-time event consumption + AI-driven remediation across hybrid Azure
• RHEL Patching with Red Hat Lightspeed and Ansible MCP Server — Collapse CVE patching from days to minutes
• Consistent Automation Developer Experience with ADT
• Event-Driven Network Configuration with NetBox and AAP
• Automated WAN Circuit Failover with NetBox and AAP

”One More Thing…” — Automation Orchestrator (Coming Q3 2026)

The biggest reveal of the day: Automation Orchestrator — the unified experience for AI-driven IT operations.

The 5-step pipeline:

1. Alerts from multiple sources — agents, events, playbooks all orchestrated on a single canvas
2. Events trigger deterministic automation rulebook
3. AI analyzes and recommends — surfaces remediation options
4. Humans approve — governance gate before execution
5. Automated remediation at scale — deterministic, auditable execution

The key principle:

“AI isn’t improvising against production infrastructure, it’s acting through AAP.”

This is one governed workflow, end-to-end — connecting event detection, AI reasoning, and deterministic execution in a single auditable pipeline. Seamless orchestration of disparate tools and processes.

Built for every automation persona:

• Intuitive GUI-based experience for platform engineers and IT operators
• Headless API and MCP integrations for automation developers

Orchestrator Live Demo: CVE-2024-6387 Remediation

The demo walked through a Vulnerability Remediation workflow — an 8-step pipeline handling a critical OpenSSH CVE end-to-end.

The AI Agent configuration:

• LLM: Red Hat AI/Nomotron 120b
• Prompt: “You are a vulnerability analysis agent. When a CVE alert arrives, query AAP inventory via MCP to find affected hosts, correlate to the correct host group, match an existing remediation job template, and submit a remediation plan for human approval. Include rollback strategy and execution approach.”
• MCP Tools assigned: Splunk Query, Splunk Alert Search, Splunk Saved Search, ServiceNow CMDB Lookup

Multi-source triggers (Step 2-3):

• IBM Instana webhook trigger for vulnerability alerts
• ServiceNOW webhook trigger for vulnerability alerts
• Both POST to the EDA webhook endpoint with auto-generated API keys

Human Review (Step 5): An approval gate where a human must approve before remediation executes. Settings include usernames to notify, custom message (“Please approve this deployment to production”), configurable timeout (1 day default), and on-timeout action: “Fail the workflow.”

Workflow Complete — results:

• CVE: CVE-2024-6387 (regresshion) — OpenSSH race condition in sshd
• Severity: CRITICAL
• Attack Vector: Network — Remote code execution via sshd
• Affected: OpenSSH 8.5p1-9.7p1 → Fix: Upgraded to OpenSSH 9.8p1
• 12 hosts patched across prod, staging, and dev environments
• Strategy: Rolling update — 3 batches of 4, zero downtime
• Health checks: All passed ✅
• ITSM Ticket: INC0038291 — Resolved and closed

Execution Timeline:

Total automated time (excluding human review): under 10 seconds. That is the Automation Orchestrator promise — from CVE alert to patched fleet in seconds, with governance gates baked in.

Additional Platform Enhancements

Platform Foundation:

• All API traffic through gateway — single ingress, simplified architecture
• Common tasking system — Dispatcherd unifies platform services
• PostgreSQL 16 and 17 support — database modernization
• Django 5.2 LTS — framework upgrade for long-term support
• Centralized OpenAPI spec — enforced API consistency across services
• ansible.platform Phase 1 — CaC foundations for unified collection

UX and Customer RFEs:

• Bulk host delete — long-requested operational efficiency
• Auth mapping label clarity — reduced confusion in authentication setup
• Repository sync date in UI — visibility into last sync status
• Feature flags runtime UI — platform operator control
• Workflow convergence improvements — better multi-path handling
• Automation Dashboard in main UI — part of installer

Related Content

• Upgrading to Ansible Automation Platform 2.6+
• Ansible VS Code Extension with MCP Server
• OpenClaw Agentic Automation with Ansible