Red Hat® Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z is continuing to change the way customers are automating IBM Z. Many z/OS customers have been exploring the automation capabilities of Ansible leveraging the IBM Z specific content contributed to the community. The team is excited to announce the new capabilities and content in the Ansible for IBM Z space.
New Ansible z/OS Core v1.4.0-beta.1 available on Ansible Galaxy
Want to help grow the Ansible for IBM Z community by contributing your playbooks?
New Ansible z/OS Core v1.4.0-beta.1 available on Ansible Galaxy
The z/OS Core collection was our first collection released, and 15 months later has been downloaded on Ansible Galaxy almost thirty thousand times! Many customers are leveraging the z/OS Core collection today to orchestrate job operations, manage RACF certificates, and growing filesystems within z/OS UNIX System Services(USS).
I am excited to announce that we recently released Ansible Core v1.4.0-beta.1, a new version of the collection on Ansible Galaxy. This new beta release brings many new features to the collection, including a new module in zos_mount, which allows users to manage mounting operations for a z/OS USS file system data set such as a ZFS. Many other modules included in the collection received enhancements or bug fixes as well. For full details about the enhancements, check out the Ansible Core v1.4.0-beta.1. release notes.
Big updates to the Ansible for IBM Z Sample Playbook repository: contribute today!
The community using Ansible for IBM Z continues to grow, and a critical part of that growth has been the Ansible for IBM Z Sample Playbook Repository. This playbook repository hosts a wide range of playbooks for automating processes for many use-cases and products.
The Sample Playbook Repository has grown incredibly over time, receiving many contributions from teams within IBM, covering many products and scenarios. Recently, playbooks were contributed by the MQ team for automating MQ operations such as interacting with local queues and backing up an application structure. The MQ team hosted a webinar "Automate and manage your MQ for z/OS queue managers with Red Hat Ansible", highlighting the automation capabilities of Ansible and MQ that you can leverage together. Watch a replay of the webinar here. In addition, the IBM® Cloud Infrastructure Center also contributed playbooks to automate the installation of Red Hat® OpenShift® Container Platform via user-provisioned infrastructure(UPI) via Ansible playbooks. OpenShift is a key technology in IBM Z customer's journeys to hybrid cloud, and automation to help you setup your cluster on IBM Z is a great capability to take advantage of.
To increase community engagement and to enhance the overall Ansible content user experience, I am excited to announce that we are now accepting contributions to the repository from anyone in the IBM Z community! The more products and companies are represented in the repository, the better, as there is a ton of opportunity and benefits to be discovered while automating with Ansible on IBM Z. Check out the contribution guidelines to understand the requirements for a contribution, and help grow the communities capabilities with Ansible automation! Now that we are accepting contributions to this repository, we hope the community continues to help collect a wide range of Ansible playbooks to automate IBM Z tasks which can be shared amongst the community.
New content available in the community
The community has been regularly producing and monitoring new content available. Here is a list of some new content to help you get started on your Ansible automation journey.
- Check out the Automation and Provisioning IBM Media Center channel, where we have been uploading videos covering different topics on Ansible. Most recently, we published a video to show how to set up your Ansible control node for getting started with Ansible for IBM Z.
- The IBM team has been hosting webinars regularly to show our customers the powers of Ansible automation working with IBM Z. For a glimpse into IBM's strategy with hybrid cloud for z/OS, as well as our vision for our customers, check out the "Hybrid cloud automation for z/OS with the z/OS Cloud Broker and Ansible" webinar here. If your shop leveraged MQ for z/OS, you should definitely check out the "Automate and manage your MQ for z/OS queue managers with Red Hat Ansible" webinar here for more details on the sample playbooks and capabilities being delivered. All past IBM Z webinars can be viewed here.
- Check out the most recent Terminal Talk podcast, where IT company Ensono talks about how they leverage Ansible with z/OS to align with the rest of the enterprises automation strategy and how Ansible improved automation for z/OS.
- Triton Consulting has a tech blog series where James Gill has been producing a series helping others get started with Ansible automation for z/OS. Check out the three part series here!
Additional Resources