Parts two and three of this series looked at passing input parameters into playbooks, and how to work with the Automate workspace. This article discusses how an Ansible playbook can be effectively used in a state machine.

Part one of this series described the functionality for using built-in roles to perform tasks with Ansible playbooks rather than Ruby methods in Fine. Part two of this series looked at how host lists and input parameters can be passed to embedded Ansible playbook services and methods. This article will discuss how a playbook method can form part of a larger automation workflow by interacting with the ManageIQ Automate workspace.

Part one of this series described the manageiq_automate and manageiq_vmdb roles that can be used by a playbook to interact with a ManageIQ workflow.

CloudForms 4.6 provided the ability to run embedded Ansible playbooks as methods, and it can be useful to include such a playbook in an existing workflow such as the VM Provision state machine.

One of the exciting new features in CloudForms 4.6 within Automate is Embedded Methods. That is, one can store reusable, directly callable, ruby code within Automate and access from other Automate Methods.

This video demonstrates how you can take manual tasks and processes and turn them into automation workflows. In this video we utilize Red Hat CloudForms and Ansible Tower to provide an underlying automation and orchestration framework to deliver automation to your IT organization.

Few days ago one of our fellows, Christian Jung, published a very good article explaining best practices while coding Ruby code inside Red Hat CloudForms. The post does not claim to be exhaustive, but establishes guidelines about coding, naming conventions and rules to follow in order to make the code cleaner, easier to understand, and more consumable by others.

In the article, several key topics are discussed, such as:

Most systems use Access Control Lists (ACL’s) to manage user’s access to objects. Common examples are ACL’s for file systems, LDAP, Web Servers and many more. Anyone who has had to create ACL rules and maintain them knows how complicated this can be. To make access control easy again, CloudForms uses tags. If the group a user belongs to has the same tag as the accessed object, access is granted, if not, access is denied.

In this post, we speak with Peter McGowan, author of Mastering CloudForms Automation, to find out about his interest in CloudForms automation and the process behind bringing his book to reality. You can download an electronic copy of the book from the Red Hat Customer Portal. (Addendum for CloudForms 4.5 & 4.6)

OpenStack Management with CloudForms

This is pretty simple but very useful. I have done a little research and whilst inspect is a way of seeing inside of an object its also hard to read and not very re-usable. Being somewhat old now (crazy thought) XML used to be the way we described things. Yes I know yaml, json etc have come to replace XML in languages such as Ruby, but I cannot get away from XML is far easier to read and self describing than the aforementioned.