Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has emerged as a powerful solution for IBM® Z® and IBM® LinuxONE clients. And now, the full Ansible Automation Platform with all its components are natively supported across the IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE environment; for more information read: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is now available on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.
Ansible Automation Platform empowers businesses to automate a wide range of IT tasks, from configuration management to application deployment, thus transforming their operations. The automation with Ansible Automation Platform can be helpful with the following IBM Z / IBM® LinuxONE environment:
- Hardware management console (HMC)
- IBM z/OS® and related software
- Linux®
- Red Hat OpenShift
- IBM z/VM®
- KVM
- IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center
Common use cases for Ansible Automation Platform are:
- Infrastructure provisioning, which includes streamlining the process of creating, booting, and restarting servers or virtual machines, as well as to build, provision, and manage the infrastructure, including to automate to mitigate configuration drifts.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the deployment and management of LPARs and virtual machines, the roll out of common configurations, the attachment of storage groups, and the installation of operating systems.
- Application deployment, which includes automated application deployment, configuration, upgrades, and day-to-day application management.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the installation of open source databases into virtual machines, CICS® and IMS provisioning, the verification of deployments.
- Configuration management, which includes a centralized configuration file management in various areas, such as the base operating systems, virtualized environments, and applications.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the consistent management of Linux across the IT environment, run TSO and operator commands across many servers simultaneously, post provisioning of connections, or the setup of SSL certificates.
- Continuous delivery, which includes the release of new software features, bug fixes, and code changes with multitier, multistep application orchestration.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are ‘patch management’ in form of downloading and installing security patches with subsequent reboot, automatic rollback in case of issues, and automate error reporting, integration of IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE environments with existing CI/CD pipelines.
- Cloud automation, which includes the provisioning of instances, networks, and infrastructure, as well as the management of the instances.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE are the provisioning of Red Hat OpenShift, e.g., with IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center, and the deployment of applications to Kubernetes.
- Security automation, which includes the orchestration of security systems to investigate and respond to threads, same for the coordination of enterprise security systems, and the quick response to security risks.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the management of encryption of volumes and cryptographic hardware, the roll out of security patches, the management of RACF®, and other security software.
- Endpoint protection, which includes the automated detection, investigation, and remediation of malicious activities on endpoint devices.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the hardening of Linux virtual machines, the usage of IBM QRadar®, IBM Instana™, or Splunk to detect issues and remediate them, the opening, management, and update of service tickets, and disaster remediation.
- Staying compliant and up to date, which includes providing shared visibility for applications, site reliability engineering, and security teams to integrate security across the organization. Teams can use automation to identify, assess, and resolve risks, define and enforce security and compliance, supporting auditing and reporting, check network devices for connectivity and protocols in use with network compliance requirements.
Examples on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE are the implementation of instructions on how to achieve CIS benchmark compliance, daily checks of the governance settings and reparation of findings, maintain an audit trail of automation.
Developers, administrators, and operators can benefit from an impressive catalog of pre-existing content available with Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated content, Red Hat Catalog, Ansible Galaxy, and Ansible on GitHub to build from.
We encourage you to use and benefit from the pre-built content from the Red Hat, IBM, vendors, and the open source community, solve your tasks and problems and share the solution with the community.