Red Hat Summit was held earlier in the year, and now that the recordings are online, we’ve pulled together all the Ansible content in one place.
Whether you were able to attend Summit or not, there are some great ideas in here to improve your use of Ansible.
Manage Windows Like Linux with Ansible
Few questions induce fear into the heart of a Linux admin more than, “Hey, can you manage these Windows servers?” In this session, we’ll show how Ansible does simple, secure, and agentless Windows management with the exact same tools, language, and philosophy used for Linux hosts. You’ll never have to log in to a Windows server again.
Managing 15,000 network devices with Ansible
Ansible allows network management across virtually any device platform. Any network device can be managed via SSH or an API. We took this cutting-edge network automation to scale with a customer’s global network infrastructure, giving them the ability to manage nearly all of their network devices at one time. In this session, Landon Holley and James Mighion from Red Hat discuss the architecture and strategies involved in network automation.
Hybrid cloud management with Ansible and CloudForms
In this session we’ll build and manage hybrid cloud environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat CloudForms.
Automation: Our way to the future, by Airbus
Airbus Civil Aircraft division, with 55,000 employees and €46 billion in revenue, faces many challenges: large and multitechnology environments including 27,000 servers, 430 OS releases, 2,500 databases, and 2,500 business-critical applications with frequent updates.
In 2016, Airbus needed a solution for the deployment and operation of applications composed of a low to medium number of components and dependencies. Last year, after an extensive proof-of-concept of 7 solutions, we selected 2 products, Red Hat Ansible Tower and CA Technologies Automic for complex apps.
In this session, we’ll discuss the benefits we’ve seen after the first year, including reduced lead time, ease of use, cost savings, better consistency and better allocation of resources. We’ll also discuss our next steps for additional node deployment, automation, and integration.
Automating your Red Hat Virtualization environment with Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Ansible
In the modern datacenter, virtualization must be able to integrate easily with other key pieces of the infrastructure in order to optimize and streamline operations. Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 includes a number of Red Hat Ansible Engine roles and integrates with Red Hat CloudForms—resulting in faster deployments, configuration, and automation.
In this session, Moran Goldboim, Red Hat Virtualization project manager, and Jon Benedict, Red Hat Virtualization tech evangelist, will demonstrate the automation of:
- Application deployment.
- Security and compliance.
- Infrastructure configuration.
- Jon and Moran will provide both slides and prepared demos to highlight the automation and orchestration of Red Hat Virtualization with Red Hat Ansible Engine and Red Hat CloudForms.
Using Ansible and Redfish to Automate Systems Management
Ansible is an open source automation engine that automates complex tasks such as application deployments, cloud provisioning, and a wide variety of system administration tasks. It is a one-to-many agentless mechanism where complex deployment and configuration tasks can be managed and monitored from a central control machine.
Redfish is an open industry-standard specification and schema designed for modern and secure management of platform hardware. Redfish APIs are available in Dell EMC PowerEdge servers via the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), which is used by IT administrators to remotely monitor and manage their infrastructure using a variety of client applications on devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones.
Together, Ansible and Redfish can be used to fully automate at large scale server monitoring, provisioning and update tasks from one central location, significantly reducing management complexity and helping improve the productivity and efficiency of IT administrators.
Google automates [Ansible] module development
Google will discuss best practices for ensuring enterprise consistency between fast moving Ansible community and the always evolving services on GCP.
Accurate and reportable configuration information for Ansible deployments
Organisations are increasingly automating the deployment of assets on multi-clouds using APIs. Ansible provides an engine to make such automated configuration changes. However, the challenge is to make sure that the state of the infrastructure can be accurately reported at all times and integration with automation tools is straightforward and part of the development lifecycle.
A configuration management database (CMDB) could be used as the starting point for driving deployment activities (e.g. by generating Ansible inventories) or to record the output of Ansible execution; or both.
In this session, we will describe the organisational challenges and benefits of closely integrating deployment automation activities with a modern and lightweight configuration management database. We will then show an example of such database built as a SpringBoot micro-service running in the OpenShift Container Platform and how it can be used from an Ansible playbook.
Giving power to the people with Ansible @ General Mills
Find out why General Mills has made Ansible their automation tool of choice. It’s currently used by more than 15 (and counting) teams—in a number of ways, including to automate a process that used to involve 8 people, but now is done at the push of a button with end-to-end infrastructure integration.
In this session, we’ll talk about how:
- We went from from Ansible core to Red Hat Ansible Tower.
- We reuse and review playbooks across the company.
- Our non-tech teams do tech things and our users automate when they don’t write code.
Come hear about our lessons learned, but more importantly, to see how they might apply to your organization.
Automating security and compliance for hybrid environments
Maintaining visibility, control, and security, and ensuring governance and compliance remains paramount, but it becomes more difficult and time consuming in a hybrid infrastructure consisting of physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments.
In this session, Lucy Kerner, Red Hat, will show you how a combination of Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and OpenSCAP can help you with these challenges in your hybrid infrastructure by automating security and compliance. Specifically, in your hybrid infrastructure, you’ll learn how to easily provision a security-compliant host, how to quickly detect and remediate security and compliance issues, how to ensure governance and control in an automated way, how to do proactive security and automated risk management, how to perform audit scans and remediations on your systems, and how to automate security to ensure compliance against regulatory or custom profiles.
Hybrid cloud network interconnect with Ansible
As organizations look to operationalize hybrid cloud strategies, it is critical to be able to interconnect clouds together. By using Ansible, organizations can be assured that applications are connected regardless of where the workload is running.
In this session, Peter Sprygada and Steven Carter of Red Hat dive into how to use Red Hat Ansible Automation to automate interconnecting public and private clouds at the network layer in support of deploying a hybrid cloud strategy.
