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Tagged with Ansible

Using Ansible workflows in CloudForms

Ansible continues to grow and is the strategic automation engine for Red Hat’s business. Having a solid and constantly improving integration with Ansible is key for CloudForms’ future success.

Ansible Tower Workflows are widely used in by the industry to orchestrate and govern interactions between different playbooks. CloudForms has been able to run Ansible Tower Jobs since its 4.1 release. Starting with CloudForms 4.7, we will expand this support and will be able to utilize Workflows from the Service Catalog.

CloudForms in AWS part 4

In this post of our series, we will demonstrate what we did in the previous sections in which we configured AWS and CloudForms, to run a SmartStaty analysis to automatically resolve a vulnerability in Java

Automating CloudForms Appliance Deployment with Ansible

Red Hat CloudForms ships as an appliance to simplify deployment as much as possible – a Red Hat Enterprise Linux server with the appropriate software loaded, ready to be configured with a few basic configuration options. Traditionally, these servers are configured using the command line tool appliance_console. This is a simple, menu-based interface that allows you to configure the core functionality of the appliance and makes it exceptionally easy to do so. Unfortunately, menu-based interfaces don’t lend themselves to being automated easily. However, there is a solution!

All CloudForms appliances ship with another tool called appliance_console_cli. We can combine this tool with an Ansible playbook to automate the configuration of our appliance(s).

Multi-tier Application Deployment using Ansible and CloudForms (Video)

This article is a follow up on our previous blog post VMware provisioning example] using Ansible, where we deployed a simple virtual machine on VMware using Ansible from the CloudForms service catalog. In this week’s demonstration, we go a step further and provision a multi-tier application on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once provisioned, the application lifecycle, as well as all day 2 operations are performed from Red Hat CloudForms.

CloudForms Service Bundle Creation using VM Provisioning and Ansible Tower Automation Job

Service catalog bundles are a really useful CloudForms feature that enable us to mix and match various existing service catalog items together to form bundles of tasks.

One of the more useful examples of a bundle is to create a new VM, and then run an Ansible Tower job template on the resulting VM to configure it with an application role. If we have an Ansible Tower server added to our CloudForms installation as an automation provider, this is quite simple. We described the procedure to configure an Ansible Tower provider in CloudForms as part of our previous series on Ansible Tower integration in CloudForms 4.1.

In this example we’ll combine two existing service catalog items. The first creates a new CentOS 7 virtual machine in a Red Hat Virtualization provider, and the second installs a simple LAMP stack using a job template defined in an Ansible Tower server, attached to CloudForms as an automation provider.

Each standalone catalog item has its own service dialog. The dialog for the VM provision service simply prompts for the service name and VM name, as follows:

My First Ansible Control Action (Video)

With this short video, we continue our series based on Red Hat Knowledge Base articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible Automation inside Red Hat CloudForms. This post is a follow-up of our previous My First Ansible Service article.