Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3,
the latest version of its enterprise framework for automating and
orchestrating IT operations. Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 includes an
updated user interface, improved scaling and the ability to run Ansible
Tower on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform,
Red Hat's enterprise-grade Kubernetes container application platform.
The latest version of the automation platform will be demoed at AnsibleFest,
the annual user conference for the Ansible community and Red Hat
Ansible Automation users, taking place in Austin, Texas, Oct. 2-3, 2018.
The
ability to more quickly and easily collaborate across teams and
platforms is a necessity in today's disparate IT environments. The
latest version of Red Hat Ansible Tower helps
to address this need by enabling organizations to take a more agile and
consistent approach to managing Red Hat environments and hybrid
infrastructure. With new features in Ansible Tower 3.3, users can extend
and scale automation across teams and IT footprints through enhanced
delegation and permissions, integration with legacy processes and
standards and an enhanced ability to share Ansible playbooks.
Additionally,
to help organizations automate more flexibly and to match the structure
of their infrastructure, Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 is now available as a
pod service and configurable directly from Red Hat OpenShift Container
Platform, enabling users to add more capacity to Ansible Tower simply by
adding more pods. Simplifying what was previously a multi-step process,
users can now scale Ansible Tower up and down at runtime as needed
directly through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform's user interface,
CLI and API.
Additional new features and enhancements available in Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3, include:
- More granular control: A
redesigned user interface puts more information at the user's
fingertips. Jobs and job templates now show more information at a
glance, including inventory and credentials, enabling users to find
information more quickly. Additionally, Ansible Tower 3.3 allows for
even easier configuration of jobs for use in scheduling and workflows.
Any item on a job that is configurable at launch, including inventory,
credentials, even surveys, can have its configuration saved to be used
in a workflow or in a schedule.
- Improved scaling: Scaling
is critical for enterprise users and Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 builds
on instance groups, which allow for reserving Tower cluster capacity for
specific organizations, inventory, or jobs. New features in instance
groups improve how to manage capacity in Tower without having to restart
the cluster.
- Support for custom Ansible environments:
Users can now create tailored Ansible environments that include custom
modules, custom libraries, and even multiple Ansible versions.
Application teams can stay on their trusted version of Ansible Engine
while other teams can upgrade on their schedules.
- Enhanced integrations: Allows
for easier management of integrations, including improved
authentication support, more granular control of LDAP, and the ability
to create tokens for third-party applications directly from Ansible
Tower.
AnsibleFest 2018
AnsibleFest
2018 is expected to be the largest to date, taking place in Austin,
Texas, Oct. 2-3, 2018. This year's event features six different breakout
tracks: Network Automation, Ansible Integrations, Business Solutions,
Best Practices, Community and Culture, and Technical Deep Dives. An
added area this year is the Getting Started Hub for those just getting
started with Ansible and Red Hat Ansible Tower. Attendees will hear
talks and success stories from customers and partners including:
American Airlines; Chevron; Cisco; ING; Microsoft; Service Master, and
many more. The full agenda and registration for the event is available here.
Availability
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 is available through ansible.com and the Red Hat Customer Portal.