Today’s enterprise is faced with a myriad of challenges of managing legacy systems and processes and yet data volumes are increasing exponentially, while demand for new services, reliability, and operational efficiency show no signs of easing up.
But what technology has created, it can also manage. Using the latest automation platforms, such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, organizations are finding that they can in fact push IT capabilities to new levels of performance while reducing costs and without expanding on the same old rigid infrastructure and processes that inhibit growth and put a damper on the introduction of new products and services.
The key is to apply automation where it can do the most good, freeing up IT specialists to concentrate on driving value to the bottom line. In most cases, this means automating the mundane, repetitive tasks that technicians hate doing anyway, while allowing them to concentrate manpower on higher-level, strategic tasks.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform concentrates its firepower on three critical aspects of the modern data environment: automation, cloud services, and collections. The platform’s automation component allows enterprises to create scalable environments as well as manage IT applications, particularly those that must engage with diverse architectures, in an efficiently optimized manner. The hosted services that comes with a Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform subscription, supports team-based collaborative processes by applying operational analytics to automated heterogeneous and hybrid environments. Ansible Content Collections extend native platform capabilities using certified and supported content, with an eye toward expanding and accelerating the adoption of automated areas of IT.
By working together, these three components strive to provide a scalable, streamlined data environment across public, private, and hybrid clouds while still preserving the necessary operational control and flexibility to deliver reliable, engaging user experiences.
On a functional level, Ansible Automation Platform utilizes a streamlined user interface, Red Hat Ansible Tower, featuring integrated notifications and enhanced permission capabilities. This component is a web-based UI that allows operators to schedule and centralize jobs while also enhancing visibility into the environment and enabling greater control and compliance management.
Ansible Tower operates as a GUI driven portal that provides a simplified view of automation jobs for entry-level managers, while the full dashboard provides quick summary views of their work environment and is designed to simplify operations for system administrators. Tower is also compatible with all major cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.
Ansible Automation Platform provides role-based access control, security, auditing, and delegation, utilizing both the REST API and the traditional command line interface (CLI) to integrate with existing tools and processes. It oversees a wide range of functions, such as networking, line of business, security, operations, and development.
Being a Red Hat product, Ansible Automation Platform is based on multiple open source projects, providing broad flexibility for such tasks as configuration management, application deployment, services orchestration, and resource provisioning. This allows IT staff to create increasingly complex environments without getting bogged down in the minutiae of daily operations and systems troubleshooting. With the right policies and architectural guidelines in place, the data environment becomes largely self-managing and self-governing, which not only improves performance and lowers operational costs but allows the enterprise to devote more resources to strengthening revenue streams, tapping new market opportunities and otherwise shoring up its core business.
Application development, in fact, is a key function of Ansible Automation Platform because the creation of new applications and services is crucial in today’s data-driven economy. By automating many development processes, organizations will be able to maintain continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) methodologies that deliver advanced services without application downtime. Crucial to this mode of operation is the broad orchestration of rolling software updates across multiple architectural tiers within the application. Using Ansible Automation Platform, organizations can maintain a single version control system that tracks changes to playbooks, runs tests against a staging environment, and then applies new configurations to production – all at speeds that far exceed what is possible with traditional manual workflows.
In this age of digital disruption, long-standing industries are being upended by start-ups that provide equal or better service through a more effective use of data and digital technologies. With an automation platform like Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, the enterprise is better equipped to weather this turbulent period by becoming the disruptor, not the disrupted.
Contact us for information on how CBTS can integrate Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform into your environment.