Automating IBM Z with Red Hat Ansible has gained momentum since IBM announced our direction with Ansible for z/OS back in December of 2019. Clients have integrated Ansible into their IBM Z environments with supported Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z collections made available to the Ansible and IBM Z communities. We have seen clients starting with simple use-cases such as orchestrating batch workloads and checking system status, and progressed to more complex use-cases like applying system maintenance, certificate renewals, and automating steps in CI/CD pipelines. Clients are leveraging supported collections and content with their Ansible Automation Platform licenses, and want the ability to run Ansible Automation Platform on the mainframe.
IBM is excited to announce that Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z and LinxONE is currently in Tech Preview with the release of Ansible Automation Platform 2.4! This means mainframe customers interested in running the Ansible Automation Platform within their mainframe development and test environments will now have the ability to do exactly that. In addition to Ansible Automation Platform support for IBM Z, Red Hat is also providing support for Ansible Automation Platform running on IBM Power Systems, which you can find more information on here. So, what will be available with the Tech Preview of Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z?
Automation Controller
The control plane for Ansible Automation Platform is the automation controller (formerly known as Ansible Tower). Automation controller includes a user interface (UI), role-based access control (RBAC), workflows, surveys, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and more, designed to help your team scale with more efficiency and flexibility. The Tech Preview will provide automation controller on:
- Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE
- Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z
Automation Execution Environments
Automation execution environments are container images on which all automation in Ansible Automation Platform is run. They are designed to provide a consistent and portable environment for executing automation and allow for easier administration of Ansible Automation Platform. Execution environments are engineered for the automation execution to be decoupled from the control plane to achieve faster development cycles and improve scalability, reliability, agility, and portability across environments. The Tech Preview will provide automation execution environments on:
- Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE
- Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z
In addition to automation controller and automation execution environments support for IBM Z, Event Driven Ansible and Ansible automation hub are in Dev Preview for development and test environments on IBM Z and LinuxONE! Ansible automation hub is where contributors such as IBM host our certified collections, which are supported by IBM and Red Hat. Event Driven Ansible designed to allow users to access event sources for observability and monitoring such as Kafka, Prometheus, and more to have reactive and proactive automated responses to events that occur. Learn more about what Red Hat provides in Developer and Tech Previews here.
Try the Tech Preview availability for Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z today!
Ready to get started with the Tech Preview for Ansible Automation Platform on IBM Z and LinuxONE? You can access the Tech Preview two different ways. First, if you are a Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform customer, you can download the Ansible Operators from the Red Hat Operator Hub, which you can learn more about here. Alternatively, customers can download automation controller or automation execution environment containers from the Red Hat Ecosystem Container Catalog. For more information, please reach out to your Red Hat account team.
Stay up to date with Ansible for IBM Z
To stay up to date with the Ansible for IBM Z community, join the IBM Z & LinuxOne community topic group for Ansible for IBM Z. If you want to join our Ansible for IBM Z Community Guild monthly calls, where the IBM Z team and Ansible users share roadmaps on content, use-cases, and collaborate on Ansible adoption, fill out this survey.
Here are some additional resources to help you get started automating with Ansible for z/OS: