Blog

Posted on

Introducing Ansible Automation Platform 2

 

For the last two years, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform product team has been hard at work developing the next major release. We are incredibly excited to introduce Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2, which was just announced at AnsibleFest 2021.

What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform 2?

The main focus was to enhance the foundational pieces of the Ansible Automation Platform and to enable automators to automate at enterprise scale more easily and flexibly. This means everything you know and love about writing Ansible Playbooks is largely unchanged, but what is evolving is the underlying implementation of how automation is developed, managed, and operated in large complex environments. In the end, enterprise automation platforms must be designed, packaged, and supported with container native and hybrid cloud environments in mind.

So how did we get here? It’s been years in the making, which included the following changes:

1. Ansible content was separated from the Ansible executable in the Ansible Project, creating a new construct called an Ansible Content Collections to house Ansible modules, plugins, roles and more in a discrete and atomic form.

The vast majority of time recently has been spent relocating the majority of Ansible content (modules, plugins) into standalone Ansible Collections developed and maintained separately from the
Ansible open source project
. The main benefit is that the updating of Ansible content is no longer dependent on updating the Ansible project itself, allowing for continuous and asynchronous releases of content while maintaining stable releases of the Ansible executable.

2. The control plane was separated from the execution plane in Ansible Tower, and renamed these components to automation controller and automation execution environments.

Ansible Tower was split into two components: automation controller (control plane) and automation execution environments (execution plane) in order to better scale and provide more predictable automation for enterprises. By splitting Tower into two components, you can now have execution running outside of the control node and is more conducive to running your automation in hybrid cloud and container native environments such as Red Hat OpenShift. You’ll also see additional features in the upcoming 2.1 release with a new component called automation mesh (think: a service mesh for Ansible), which replaces isolated nodes in Ansible Tower. This becomes more interesting by enabling new use cases such as automating at or to the edge as well as cloud automation.

3. New tools were created to better enable enterprise automation developers.

Developing Ansible content has largely been up to the individual for building and curating content. New tools such as automation content navigator (ansible-navigator) and execution environment builder (ansible-builder) allow for a more consistent experience for content developed on a workstation that’s destined for an enterprise automation controller instance. This is made possible with  automation execution environments, which are now much more predictable, portable, and scalable compared to traditional Python virtual environments previously.

Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces an improved architecture and a variety of new tools to scale your automation while still providing a familiar Ansible experience to your teams.  We want to provide you with all the information you need to get your automation teams up to speed on the new features and start developing your migration strategy (if applicable) to best prepare for the forthcoming 2.1 general availability anticipated for later this year. Over the next month, keep an eye on the Knowledgebase on Red Hat Customer Portal for all the latest on documentation, installation, migration and component deep dives.

Where do I go next?

As automation becomes more strategic to your business, so will the changes you make in the way you can adopt, manage and operate automation. Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces an improved architecture and flexibility with automation controller and automation execution environments, along with a variety of new tools to scale your automation while still providing a familiar experience to your teams.  We want to ensure you have all the information you need to get your automation teams up to speed on the new features and start developing your migration strategy.

There are a number of resources available as you begin to explore Ansible Automation Platform 2:

To learn more about new features and components, check out the updated product overview page on ansible.com. You can also consult our new interactive features guide.

If you’re ready to get hands on, we have self-paced interactive labs available to explore right now.  

It’s not too late to register (for free!) for AnsibleFest 2021; you can follow along live on September 29th and 30th, or explore session content on-demand following the event. 

We also encourage you to register for our free upcoming webinar “Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform brings you a new way to automate,” which will be live on November 2 and available afterwards on demand.

How do I get more help?

If you are interested in hearing more about Ansible Automation Platform 2, please reach out to your Red Hat sales representative. In the meantime, you can log into the Red Hat Customer Portal for official resources around the launch, including migration considerations, getting started blogs, and official documentation which can be found at the Early Access page. (Note: a Red Hat subscription is required for access)

Still need assistance? Can’t find your Red Hat Sales representative? Contact Red Hat Technical support for additional information. Please refer to the official resources that will help you on your automation journey.

Posted on

Keys to accelerating IT innovation: technology and collaboration

Technology is helping organizations to deliver on their mission and become smarter and more efficient to differentiate themselves from the competition. It is also helping to shape the world, as we depend on it to assist with basic demands such as food, living space, health, safety, mobility, communication, education, entertainment, as well as governmental and financial services. In parallel, we are also living in an era of information technology in which we are still witnessing exponential efficiency gains in basic capabilities like compute, storage, and networking. Data is fueling innovation and it has become clearer than ever the true value of data.

Many outcomes of technology innovation start as small agile projects. Some of them scale to large impact. There are so many ways to innovate, which leads organizations to question where to start and how to approach it. Co-Creation and Design Thinking have proven to be the right concepts for innovation because they focus on jointly understanding an area of business and implementing a change, doing something more intelligently, efficiently. Experts of different areas are working together to design and implement a solution as a minimum viable product, which can be augmented and scaled over time to generate big impact.

It is important that an understanding of a specific industry or industry opportunity is in place. Many innovations are specific to an industry, but they can also disrupt existing business operations in that industry, if for example, a manual task is automated or an analog asset is digitalized.

It is not only about having experts from different areas working together, but it is also key to have diversity in the agile teams. This includes the diversity of age. Collaboration of experienced baby boomers with early professionals from Generation Y or Z can do magic. It is valuable to nurture diversity, openness, and respect.

When it comes to technology decisions, the value comes from the ecosystem that is behind a solution. An open hybrid cloud and AI platform approach backed by open source is an incredible foundation. But the largest value is gained when this system is simultaneously backed by professional services and an ecosystem of additional software. Red Hat OpenShift plays a big role here because this open and secure, enterprise ready Kubernetes platform enables teams to develop once and deploy everywhere. It avoids lock-in into a single technology stack. It opens the doors to deployments in private data centers, at the edge or in public cloud or collocation sites.

Data and AI will be ingredients of nearly every innovative solution. It’s crucial to have the ability to use AI and to train AI models, but also to use the trained models at the edge which means close to the device where the data lives. The opportunity to apply AI models to existing or future data is huge.

But as data becomes more valuable, so too does the risk of cyber-attacks as hackers are eager to get their share of the value. In the 2021 X-Force Threat Intelligence Index report, based on billions of data points from clients and public sources, a major finding was that ransomware was the most popular attack method in 2020, making up 23% of all incidents IBM Security X-Force responded to and helped remediate. Innovation needs to go hand in hand with handling increasing cyber risks.

And the efficiency gains in technology might slow down in the decade to come. Information Technology is reaching more and more the atomic scope which will limit the ability to scale compute, storage, and networking hardware further down to deliver more outcome with less resources. The future of computing will need to combine new computing concepts to create the systems needed to tackle challenges with more efficiency. This will include Quantum computers, AI hardware and optimized scaling for traditional semiconductors.

All these important elements of innovation will be highlighted at this year’s IBM TechU where I will be hosting the “Architecting the Future” track. Participants at this year’s TechU will get a complete picture of drivers and ingredients for innovating your business with IBM Z, LinuxONE, Power and Storage and beyond from a range of technical leaders; Eight hosted live sessions will inspire you about what’s next.

>> Click here to learn more about IBM TechU.

The post Keys to accelerating IT innovation: technology and collaboration appeared first on Servers & Storage.

Posted on

“Our backup speeds have been cut in half” and they shortened their downtimes and gained more confidence in their full system recovery ability, read more… #backupandrecovery #virtualtape

“Our backup speeds have been cut in half” and they shortened their downtimes and gained more confidence in their full system recovery ability, read more…laservault.com/vitl-2/vitl-su…
#IBMi #backupandrecovery #virtualtape pic.twitter.com/WaRcgkEku1

– LaserVault (@LVBackup)10:32 – Sep 29, 2021

Verified by MonsterInsights