Red
Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source
solutions, today announced a new, Ansible automation-centric approach to
multi-cloud management with Red Hat CloudForms 4.5. As enterprise IT
platforms are transformed into a set of dynamic, virtualized
infrastructures both on and off-premises, they introduce significant
complexities around self-service, governance and compliance, resource
management, financial controls, and capacity planning. With Red Hat
CloudForms 4.5, organizations can more quickly and easily publish fully
automated IT services, providing their end users with policy-controlled
self-service lifecycle management of their resources, while maintaining
greater visibility and management capabilities for disparate resources.
Based on the open source ManageIQ project,
Red Hat CloudForms is a multi-cloud management platform (CMP) that
enables policy controlled self-service for consumers of IT services. It
gives IT operations teams a system to detect and respond to environment
changes by tracking activities, capturing events and detecting
configuration changes. CloudForms also provides IT organizations with
the ability to monitor utilization and capacity via customizable
policies for governance and compliance enforcement, as well as tools for
IT financial management by using consumption data and billing rates to
generate chargeback reporting.
Ansible
by Red Hat is a simple, powerful and agentless open source IT
automation platform that enables entire teams to automate repetitive
tasks using a simple, human-readable language. It helps to define and
manage the systems, network devices, applications, and tools that
enterprise IT organizations are using today, driving down complexity by
describing infrastructure and processes in Ansible Playbooks, which are
then run by the powerful Ansible automation engine.
Red
Hat CloudForms 4.5 natively integrates Ansible, taking an
industry-first automation-based approach to multi-cloud management. This
is designed not only to make Red Hat CloudForms more easily deployable
across an organization, 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 Catalog - Service
catalog 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 optimize 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.
Automation
is an essential component of strategic modernization and digital
transformation, especially for dynamic IT environments that require a
new type of management solution. A growing number of organizations
around the world are starting to standardize on Ansible for automation.
By bringing Ansible automation across its management portfolio,
including Red Hat CloudForms for multi-cloud management, Ansible Tower
for centralized automation governance, and Red Hat Insights for
predictive analytics, Red Hat is delivering strategic management and
automation capabilities to enterprises.
Availability
Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 is expected to be generally available in the Red Hat Customer Portal later this month.