ProRail accelerates IT processes from weeks to days with automation

Dutch rail operator ProRail, to prepare for growing traffic and new demand for operational technology, sought to make its IT network and infrastructure more efficient. By expanding its use of Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform with help from Red Hat Consulting, the company has adopted standardized processes for network switch modification and more.

Dutch rail operator ProRail is responsible for the Netherlands’ entire railway network. To prepare
for growing traffic and new demand for operational technology, ProRail sought to make its IT
network and infrastructure more efficient. By expanding its use of Red Hat Ansible Automation
Platform with help from Red Hat Consulting, the company has adopted standardized processes
for network switch modification and more. A new automation community of practice (CoP) has
simplified cross-team collaboration and established a foundation for ongoing innovation.

Preparing IT to support future increase in railway traffic
ProRail is responsible for maintenance, expansion, and safety operations of the Dutch railway
network, including more than 7,000km of track, 11,600 signals, and 160 million km of yearly train
traffic. Its mission to connect people, cities, and companies focuses on making travel pleasant and
safe on sustainable transportation.
In response to its projections that passenger rail traffic will increase by 30% and freight traffic by 50%
by 2030, ProRail needs to run more trains—and with less disruption. Focusing on this growth means
not only the railway manager’s IT team, but also its signaling and track operations department were
increasingly reliant on information and communications technologies (ICT).
ProRail established a more efficient IT organization, but complex processes coupled with a massive
volume of documentation caused delay and difficulty. The railway manager decided that modernizing
and standardizing these processes with automation would help the IT team support more demand
with less time and effort.
“As ICT use across our organization increases, the demand on our IT network is going to grow
exponentially,” said Coert Busio, IT4IT and IT4OT Manager, ProRail. “We knew we needed to become
much more efficient and do things in a standard way to achieve our goal of preparing for the coming
increase in rail traffic. As network projects bring a large number of new services, automation will
ensure the projects are standardized and progress faster.”

Expanding end-to-end automation platform to new processes
ProRail decided to expand use of its existing automation technology, Red Hat Ansible Automation
Platform, to address this new IT challenge. The railway manager has successfully used Ansible
Automation Platform to automate its Linux® environment for more than 5 years.
Red Hat’s automation platform uses human-readable scripts, or playbooks, to replace routine,
manual processes and tasks with repeatable configuration management that simplifies
complex deployments.
“Applying Ansible Automation Platform to our network environment was the logical step forward,” said
Busio. “Doing so would allow us to integrate our existing Ansible Playbooks so we could use and reuse
them. And according to our engineers, writing new playbooks when we need them saves
time and provides quality processes.”
The railway manager now uses Ansible Automation Platform to manage deployment of connectors for
its TIBCO enterprise service bus (ESB), integrating all of its applications. Network domain
backup tasks are also automated using Ansible Playbooks. ProRail’s IT operations team also uses
the platform to automatically fetch IP information from the domain name server (DNS) network
to deploy a new application or server.
In addition to initial guidance on creating playbooks, Red Hat Consulting provides ongoing guidance
to ProRail management on reaching the organization’s automation goals, including expanding
adoption of Ansible Automation Platform.

Adopting an automation-centric approach to IT development and
management

Saved time from 60 minutes to 20 minutes
By automating software installation and other IT network management tasks, ProRail has reduced the
time and effort needed to roll out new systems, applications, and tools. The railway manager can now
complete these tasks faster and more efficiently.
For example, ProRail’s network team needed days to manually modify general settings in 3,000
switches when a new DNS was introduced. By automating those changes with Ansible Automation
Platform, they can be completed within several hours.
“Previously, our network operations staff had to log onto each switch to make the change, which
took 2 or 3 minutes each,” said Busio. “Ansible Automation Platform can change each switch in
just a few seconds.”
As ProRail continues investing in building teams’ knowledge and support, the company anticipates
additional efficiency and quality improvements.

Established cross-functional automation community of practice
ProRail is working on improving the lengthy and complex change process for its engineering teams.
With approved Ansible Playbooks producing standard documentation, modifications can move
forward from concept to production more quickly.
In addition, standardizing processes with automation has also created new opportunities for
collaboration between IT teams. With guidance and initial website content from Red Hat Consulting,
ProRail has established an automation community of practice (CoP). The group has grown from 30
network domain engineers to almost 60 participants, including ESB engineers and others eager to
share their automation experience and tips.
“The goal is to use playbooks across the different teams, such as Network, ESB and Operating System,
to ensure the service is provided,” said Busio. “The interaction we’re seeing between the engineers is
fantastic. Mindsets are changing as people are thinking about how to
automate and how to collaborate.”

Improved talent acquisition with innovative technology
In an aging workforce where many engineers are approaching retirement, adopting modern
technology like Ansible Automation Platform is helping ProRail attract new talent.
“In addition to giving our current staff access to the most innovative tools, we need to encourage
young people to join us. Using and supporting modern technologies that our employees are eager to
work with, such as Ansible Automation Platform, helps with those efforts,” said Busio.

Expanding automation culture to new systems, including critical
railway operations
In support of a mandate that all new network initiatives adopt automation, the use of Ansible
Automation Platform is growing at ProRail. “Our Windows team now uses it to automate their tasks.
We’re also working on a self-service portal for developers to request simple network or Linux tasks,
as well as possibly integrating Ansible for our IT service management tool and writing playbooks for
our service desk,” said Busio. “Our goal is an end-to-end, integrated automation approach.”

The railway manager is also exploring expanding the platform to managing critical railways
systems, including those responsible for overhead lines and signage. “If we can connect to SCADA
[supervisory control and data acquisition] and PLC [programmable logic controller] systems
to monitor them and roll out updates automatically, that will save our mechanics a lot of time,”
said Busio.
The benefits of automation could also extend to ProRail’s application development partners by using
Ansible Automation Platform to build standardized Jenkins continuous integration and continuous
delivery (CI/CD) pipelines across the required technology stack, including a virtual machine (VM),
OS, and TIBCO connector.
“Our use of Ansible Automation Platform to build a higher-quality IT network makes us proud to be
at the forefront of automation,” said Busio.

About ProRail
ProRail is responsible for maintaining and extending the national railway network infrastructure.
It is also responsible for allocating rail capacity, informing operators, and controlling rail traffic.
The rail infrastructure includes more than 7,000 kilometers of track and 11,600 signals. prorail.nl

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