CIQ is making available its Ascender enterprise infrastructure automation platform installer. This marks the launch of the CIQ rollout of Ascender installers for all Kubernetes-based platforms.

Made generally available in July, Ascender leverages open source Ansible AWX and includes a full suite of turn-key, supported, open source Ansible playbooks created and maintained by CIQ. Ascender governs the automation of Rocky Linux management at scale as well as workloads, networking, devices, public clouds and other infrastructure at an enterprise level. With this rollout, CIQ is responding to community demand by simplifying the deployment of an automation platform, ensuring accessibility for a broader audience. As always, CIQ is available to help clients with larger and/or supported deployments. 

"Our goal for Ascender is to lower the barrier to entry for infrastructure automation by making it possible for operators to automate their enterprise infrastructure on any platform in minutes, whether they are Kubernetes experts or have never even used Linux," said Greg Sowell, principal solutions engineer at CIQ. "Today, you can go to GitHub and automatically deploy the Ascender installer on an Enterprise Linux system via Kubernetes, without having to sort through all the prerequisites and with clear documentation to guide you through the process, if you need it. This will include an installer for Amazon EKS, and we'll continue to roll out automated Ascender deployments for every platform our customers need. We want to enable everyone to run Ascender wherever they want and minimize their time to value."

With Ascender, a single administrator can apply complex patches, security hardening standards or other changes to a fleet of servers or other devices-with the click of a button or an API call. Ascender also provides a built-in reporting capability to track patching and current state for Rocky Linux and Windows servers. Ascender's web-based GUI and REST API allow for easy consumption of automation by end-users who have varying levels of technical expertise and responsibilities. In addition, audit logs and access controls prevent unintended changes and production downtimes as well as help maintain compliance.

"If you're running automation at scale from the command line with Ansible, you have little control," adds Sowell. "Plus, it can be difficult to track changes, such as who has done what and when, capture any failures and successes, or implement least-privilege access. Ascender does all that for you. And whereas other automation platforms charge by the number of devices, Ascender offers a price point that is much more amenable to customers running automation at scale, so there's no more counting nodes."

Availability

The Ascender installer is available now at the Ascender Installer Github repository, along with simple instructions to walk users through an install. Users can add Ascender to an existing Kubernetes cluster or automatically set up a new one.