Ansible Tower 3.3 arrives to make DevOps easier than ever

Source- zdnet.com

Red Hat’s Ansible Tower, like other DevOps tools, such as Chefand Puppet, makes it much easier to manage your IT infrastructure without the blood, sweat, and tears of manually setting up servers, containers, and clouds. With the latest edition, Ansible Tower 3.3, you can do all that with an improved user interface and scaling, and you can now run it on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat’s Kubernetes container application platform.

Ansible makes it easier to move your resources and applications from platform to platform as needed. In a world where your data and applications are running simultaneously on containers, virtual machines, private and public clouds, this is a must.

As Joe Fitzgerald, Red Hat VP, said in a statement, “As more organizations move toward modernizing their infrastructure, tools that can work seamlessly across environments become a critical part of that equation. Red Hat Ansible Tower can already run anywhere it’s needed across hybrid environments and now with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform functionality available in Ansible Tower 3.3 we take that a step further by making the platform consumable in more ways for even easier automation across infrastructures.”

On OpenShift, Ansible Tower 3.3 is now available as a pod service and configurable directly from Red Hat Container Platform. This enables users to add more capacity to Ansible Tower simply by adding more pods. Simplifying what was previously a multi-step process, users can now scale Ansible Tower up and down at runtime as needed directly through Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform’s user interface, command line and application programming interface (API).

Ansible Tower other new features and improvements include:

• More granular control: A redesigned user interface puts more information at user’s fingertips. Jobs and job templates now show more information at a glance, including inventory and credentials, enabling users to find information more quickly. Additionally, Ansible Tower 3.3 enables you to save any item on a job that’s configurable at launch. This includes inventory, credentials, and surveys. You can then use this saved configuration in a workflow or on a schedule.

• Improved scaling: Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.3 builds on instance groups, which allow for reserving Tower cluster capacity for specific organizations, inventory, or jobs. New features in instance groups improve how to manage capacity in Tower without having to restart the cluster.

• Custom Ansible environment support: Users can now create tailored Ansible environments. These can include custom modules, custom libraries, and even multiple Ansible versions. Application teams can stay on their trusted version of Ansible Engine while other teams can upgrade on their schedules.

Ansible’s developers says it’s “radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. Avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications — automate in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems.” They’re right.