Workshop Overview

Business scenario

You’re a platform administrator at a growing organization that has invested in Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). Your team has built automation workflows, but you’re facing a critical challenge: adoption is slow, and onboarding new users to automation is difficult.

Your organization has subject matter experts (SMEs) across many IT domains—cloud administrators, network engineers, and Linux system administrators. They’re experts in their fields, but not all of them are automation savvy. They don’t want to learn Ansible playbooks or navigate complex automation interfaces. They just want a simple, secure way to run automation as part of their day-to-day tasks.

Your manager has asked you to solve this problem. The organization needs to:

  • Broaden automation adoption across teams without requiring everyone to become Ansible experts

  • Provide self-service capabilities to domain experts with appropriate guardrails

  • Maintain security and governance through role-based access control

  • Reduce the burden on the automation team by enabling users to help themselves

Some organizations have tried integrating third-party systems or building custom portals—with varying degrees of success. You need a better solution that’s native to Red Hat’s automation ecosystem.

The answer: Self-Service Automation Portal.

What is Self-Service Automation Portal?

Self-Service Automation Portal is a simple, focused interface built for one purpose: to run automation. It provides:

  • Single sign-on using the same AAP credentials

  • Automatic synchronization of organizations, users, teams, and job templates from AAP

  • Role-based access so users only see the automation they’re authorized to execute

  • Custom dynamic templates for sophisticated, enterprise-ready automation experiences

  • Business user-friendly interface that hides automation complexity

Red Hat Self-Service Automation Portal gives control back to the automation team to provide a self-service experience that broadens who can automate and increases platform usage.

Learning objectives

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

  • Configure role-based access control (RBAC) in Ansible Automation Platform to define permissions for different user teams

  • Set up RBAC in Self-Service Automation Portal to control which users can access and execute specific automation templates

  • Validate the synchronization between AAP and Self-Service Portal to ensure users see appropriate automation content

  • Test the user experience from multiple persona perspectives (cloud admin, network admin, RHEL admin)

  • Modify job template surveys in AAP and see the changes automatically reflected in the Self-Service Portal

  • Import and launch custom dynamic templates to provide advanced automation experiences beyond standard surveys

Module breakdown

Module 1: Configure Ansible Automation Platform for Self-Service Portal

Duration: 35 minutes

Topics covered:

  • Understanding RBAC in Ansible Automation Platform 2.6

  • Creating teams for different IT domains (cloud, network, RHEL)

  • Assigning roles and permissions to job templates, inventories, and credentials

  • Assigning users to teams

  • Understanding RBAC in Self-Service Automation Portal

  • Configuring portal permissions for catalog and scaffolder plugins

  • Creating conditional RBAC rules for advanced access control

  • Validating content synchronization between AAP and Self-Service Portal

What you’ll build:

  • 3 teams: cloud-team, network-team, rhel-team

  • Role assignments for each team to specific job templates, inventories, and credentials

  • 2 RBAC policies in Self-Service Portal: ssa-portal-users and saa-portal-rhel-team

Module 2: User Persona Testing in Self-Service Automation Portal

Duration: 30 minutes

Topics covered:

  • Testing the portal as different user personas

  • Validating that users only see authorized automation templates

  • Understanding the user experience for non-automation experts

  • Running automation jobs from the Self-Service Portal

  • Observing how RBAC controls access to credentials and inventories

User personas:

  • Cloud Administrator (clouduser1) - Access to AWS, Azure, GCP job templates

  • Network Administrator (networkuser1) - Access to network automation templates

  • RHEL Administrator (rheluser1) - Access to Linux/RHEL and select cloud provisioning templates

Module 3: Surveys and Custom Templates

Duration: 40 minutes

Topics covered:

  • Understanding surveys in Ansible Automation Platform

  • Modifying surveys on job templates in AAP

  • Automatic synchronization of survey changes to Self-Service Portal

  • Importing custom dynamic templates from Git repositories

  • Advanced automation experiences with custom templates

  • Launching and using custom dynamic templates

What you’ll build:

  • Enhanced survey on Linux/RHEL START Service on RHEL job template

  • Custom dynamic template: ⏰ Manage RHEL Time Servers

Expected outcomes

After completing this workshop, you will:

  • Understand how to enable self-service automation for non-automation experts

  • Be confident configuring RBAC across AAP and Self-Service Portal

  • Know how to customize the user experience with surveys and dynamic templates

  • Be ready to deploy Self-Service Automation Portal in your own organization

  • Understand how to broaden automation adoption across your organization

Target audience and prerequisites

This workshop is designed for:

  • Ansible Automation Platform administrators responsible for platform governance

  • DevOps engineers enabling self-service automation across teams

  • Platform architects designing automation adoption strategies

  • IT leaders seeking to broaden automation usage in their organizations

Prerequisites:

  • Basic familiarity with Ansible Automation Platform concepts (organizations, users, teams, job templates)

  • Understanding of role-based access control (RBAC) principles

  • A web browser (Chrome, Firefox, or Edge recommended)