FEATURE
This is designed not only to make Red
Hat CloudForms more easily deployable
across an organisation, but also to
provide customers with far more readily
available integration points, increasing
the depth and breadth of automation
for their IT service management
needs. This integration is aligned
with Red Hat’s vision to simplify IT
management with Ansible’s powerful
automation capabilities.
Highlights of the Ansible integration
with Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 include:
• Service catalogue – Service
catalogue items can now consist
of Ansible Playbooks in addition
to OpenStack Orchestration (Heat)
templates, Amazon Web Services
(AWS) CloudFormation, Microsoft
Azure Stack, VMware vApp and more,
enabling administrators to more
rapidly define and publish a greater
number of services for their users.
• Governance – Administrators can
now use Ansible Playbooks to enforce
many different IT policy models and
more easily assess that deployed
systems are staying compliant,
enforce security standards and
optimise resources.
• Access to the Ansible ecosystem
– More than 10,000 pre-built Ansible
Playbooks and more than 1,000
integration modules can now be directly
used in Red Hat CloudForms, delivered
as IT services and used for policy
enforcement and compliance.
Ansible 2.3
Red Hat has also announced the general
availability of Ansible 2.3; this version
provides performance enhancements
and advanced networking capabilities,
including adding connection methods
designed to increase flexibility and
improve performance.
Dave Thelen, Extensibility Engineer,
Arista Networks says: “Ansible has
quickly become one of the most
important tools in the network
operating tool belt. Whether it be
automating the deployment of an
entire data centre or using playbooks
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to more efficiently troubleshoot issues,
Ansible allows tasks that used to take
significant time to be automated
quickly with a very low learning curve.
The enhancements that are included
in 2.3 will allow for automating even
more tasks for networks of any size
and complexity.”
The latest version of the automation
technology, Ansible 2.3, retains a
focus on networking infrastructure
enablement through new features as
well as providing overall performance
enhancements, including:
• Enhanced networking capabilities
such as a persistent connections
framework. Persistent connections allow
for one SSH connection to stay active
across multiple Ansible tasks – reducing
the total time for completion and
delivering up to 10 times networking
performance improvement in tests
conducted by Red Hat and various
partners. For Ansible Playbooks to take
advantage of persistent connections
in version 2.3, two connection
methods have been enabled: 1) the
existing command line interface (CLI)
connection method and 2) the newly
added NETCONF connection method.
Additionally, Ansible 2.3 includes
new networking platform support or
modules from the following: Apstra,
Arista Networks, Avi Networks, Big
Switch Networks, Cumulus Networks,
Fortinet, Huawei, Lenovo, Ordnance
and Palo Alto Networks. The number
of supported networking platforms has
grown to 29 and the total networking
module count is now 267.
John Maddison, Senior Vice President
of Products and Solutions, Fortinet says:
“Increasing network complexity and a
rapidly expanding threat landscape is
driving the need for flexible tools that
enable organisations to automate
their security and network operations
to suit their individual needs. Fortinet’s
Ansible 2.3 integration provides
additional DevOps tools that enable our
carrier, service provider and enterprise
customers to optimise their network
operations to fully leverage the broad,
powerful and automated defences of
the Fortinet Security Fabric.”
“Since first
introducing
networking
modules into
Ansible, we have
aimed to help users
better orchestrate
entire application
infrastructures,
including network
devices, with one
automation tool.”
• Broader support for Microsoft
Windows with many new and
enhanced modules that make
automating Windows with
Ansible easier. Ansible 2.3 also
offers pipelining support to
boost performance.
• Simplified integration of community
contributions with the introduction of
a metadata-based system for modules.
There now is one centralised repository
for contributions, tickets, submissions
and more – making it easier for both
the community and the Ansible Core
team to manage and drive further
community involvement.
Tim Cramer, Engineering Director,
Ansible, Red Hat, concluded “Since
first introducing networking modules
into Ansible, we have aimed to
help users better orchestrate entire
application infrastructures, including
network devices, with one automation
tool. With Ansible 2.3 the total
number of networking modules has
grown to 267 and we have expanded
from networking enablement to a
focus on increasing performance and
providing better support for network
environments, making Ansible a key
component of networking deployments
in production.”
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