building and managing clouds with cloudforms & ansible · building and managing clouds with...

Building and Managing Clouds with CloudForms & Ansible

Götz RiegerSenior Solution ArchitectJanuary 27, 2017

Cloud Management: CloudForms and Ansible2

First Things First: Where are We?Yes, IaaS-centric, but one has to start somewhere...


What is this “Cloud” in “Hybrid Cloud” again?Essential characteristics

Cloud is widely seen as the next-generation IT delivery model.

● On-demand consumption (“pay as you go”)

● Self-Service (reduces overhead and maintenance)

● Measured service: chargeback/showback

● Rapid elasticity

● Resource pooling, multi-tenant model


It Might be THE CLOUDYour platform is hybrid, but still needs unified control

Either if you are just virtualizing (yet), looking into private cloud services or use public cloud offerings already, you need to:

● Provision instances/VMs/networks/storage

● Manage the life cycle of your instances/VMs

● Ensure security and compliance

● Do configuration management

● Orchestrate application deployments

● Offer self-service

● Reporting & chargeback

● Ccapacity planning, bottleneck analysis, root cause analysis.....

● And automated as far as possible, of course


Red Hat CloudFormsComprehensive cloud management the Open Source way

You manage a complex, hybrid IT environment. Your IT infrastructure moves from virtualization toward an Infrastructure-as-a-Service model. Then CloudForms is for you.

● Manage virtualization & cloud providers out-of-the-box:

● Red Hat Virtualization, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack...

● Manage guest and host systems

● Deliver capabilities across all providers

● Delivered as easy to deploy appliance

● Scalability and high availability build-in


CloudForms CapabilitiesToo much to cover, lets touch the most important

CloudForms delivers a long list of features and capabilities over a range of cloud and infrastructure technologies.

● Service delivery and cost control

● Self-service portal and service catalogs

● Resource quotas, cost allocation, and chargeback

● Life-cycle management, including retirement

● Operational visibility and control

● Continuous discovery, monitoring, and tracking

● Resource usage, optimization

● Capacity planning

● Compliance and governance

● Policy enforcement and remediation

● Approval workflows

● Configuration auditing, change tracking, and drift analysis


CloudForms and the Cloud... Build your Cloud with CloudForms

CloudForms helps to manage your virtual and cloud infrastructure.

● Deliver user self-service/”IT on demand”

● Get visibility into the operations of your environments through continuous discovery.

● Put resource quota and approval workflows in place.

● Keep an eye on your resources & costs. Across all technologies.

● Integrate external systems


Ansible by Red HatDeploy apps. Manage systems. Crush complexity.

Ansible is simple, agentless IT automation technology. Repetitive tasks are automated using a simple, human-readable language that anyone in your IT organization can understand.

Ansible is:

● An open source automation platform

● Agentless

● Free to download and use

Ansible offers:

● Configuration management

● Application deployment

● Task automation


Ansible Tower by Red HatMission control for Ansible

Ansible is great, but it gets even better with Ansible Tower.

Ansible Tower adds:

● A centralized API for your Ansible automation

● A graphical user interface for Ansible

Ansible Tower offers:

● A visual dashboard.

● Role-based access control

● Job scheduling

● Graphical inventory management

● Real-time job status updates


Manage your Cloud with Ansible TowerAnsible & Cloud

Ansible’s cloud support makes it easy to provision instances, networks, and complete cloud infrastructure wherever you need.

● Ansible is agentless, light-weight and simple. Perfect for cloud workloads.

But cloud is more than some servers in someone else's data center. Cloud providers offer a lot of services.

● Ansible supports many cloud services out-of-the-box.

● Ansible includes hundreds of modules for various public and private cloud technologies and vendors.

● Even the most complicated cloud environments can be easily described in Ansible playbooks.

● Dynamic inventory and Ansible Tower's cloud inventory synchronization let you know exactly what instances you have no matter how they were launched.


Nice Portfolio, Great ToolsWe think so, too.

You might have noticed there are some overlappings between the product's capabilities. But basically they have well-defined positions.

● CloudForms for building clouds and all things cloud management.

● Ansible to do the grunt work of configuration management, automation and orchestration.

It's a no-brainer to see the value of combining CloudForms and Ansible's capabilities. So...

what about integration?


Integration: CloudForms & Ansible Already there

CloudForms gets visibility of the Ansible Tower inventory, including hosts and job templates.

● Make CloudForms easier to extend:

● Launch Ansible Job Templates from CloudForms Automate

● On a click of a button, or as an action on a control policy.

● Launch Ansible Job Templates as a Service.


Integration: Dive Deeper, get More It's Open Management, after all

Apart from integration provided out of the box, don't forget all products have powerful APIs and scripting capabilites.

● So role your own integration is always an option.

● Want to get a taste? Look at these Summit 2016 presentations (https://www.redhat.com/en/summit):

● “Automation and configuration management across hybrid clouds with CloudForms, Satellite 6, Ansible Tower”

● “Compliance, Security Automation, and Remediation with Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, and Ansible Tower by Red Hat”


Integration Example Disclaimer: Not out of the box *

Here is one idea for an integration workflow.

● Step 1 – A user orders a self-service catalog item from CloudForms.

● Step 2 – CloudForms connects to the provider and creates the virtual machine(s).

● Step 3 – Upon successful creation of virtual machines CloudForms reaches out to Ansible Tower to create the inventory and to initiate a job on Ansible Tower to execute the appropriate playbook(s).

● Step 4 – The virtual machine(s) subscribes to the Satellite and pulls trusted content from it as part of the playbook.

(* But manageable: https://allthingsopen.com/2015/11/11/ansible-and-cloudforms-do-you-want-to-deploy-more-stacks-faster-sure-we-all-do/

THANK YOU

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