One of my teammates, Aubrey, recently put together a walkthrough of the new Execution Environment Builder in Ansible Automation Platform 2.7, and I thought it was worth sharing here for anyone who spends time maintaining execution environments.
The demo shows how to build and publish an execution environment directly from the Automation Portal UI. Instead of manually creating definition files and running build commands, you can select collections, add Python/system dependencies, and let AAP handle the build and publishing process.
A few things covered in the video:
- Selecting a base execution environment image
- Adding collections from Private Automation Hub, GitHub, or GitLab
- Including Python and system package dependencies
- Publishing the resulting image to a container registry
- Tracking build progress and logs from the UI
What I found interesting is that it lowers the barrier for teams that may not be comfortable maintaining container build workflows but still need custom execution environments for things like network automation, cloud automation, or integrating additional Python libraries.
If you’ve been curious about how the new builder works in practice, this gives a good end-to-end look at the workflow.
I’m also curious how others are currently managing their execution environments today—manually with ansible-builder, through CI/CD pipelines, or something else?
