Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 with Ansible support, a new approach to multi-cloud management

Red Hat, Inc. has announced a new, automation-centric approach to multi-cloud management with Red Hat CloudForms 4.5. With Red Hat CloudForms 4.5, organizations can more quickly and easily publish fully automated IT services, providing their end users with policy-controlled self-service lifecycle management of their resources, while maintaining greater visibility and management capabilities for disparate resources.

Red Hat CloudForms is a multi-cloud management platform (CMP) that enables policy controlled self-service for consumers of IT services. Ansible by Red Hat is a simple, powerful and agentless open-source IT automation platform that enables entire teams to automate repetitive tasks using a simple, human-readable language. Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 natively integrates Ansible, taking an industry-first automation-based approach to multi-cloud management. This is designed not only to make Red Hat CloudForms more easily deployable across an organization, but also to provide customers with far more readily available integration points, increasing the depth and breadth of automation for their IT service management needs. This integration is aligned with Red Hat’s vision to simplify IT management with Ansible’s powerful automation capabilities.

Highlights of the Ansible integration with Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 include:

* Service Catalog – Service catalog items can now consist of Ansible Playbooks in addition to OpenStack Orchestration (Heat) templates, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CloudFormation, Microsoft Azure Stack, VMware vApp and more, enabling administrators to more rapidly define and publish a greater number of services for their users.

* Governance – Administrators can now use Ansible Playbooks to enforce many different IT policy models and more easily assess that deployed systems are staying compliant, enforce security standards and optimize resources.

* Access to the Ansible ecosystem – More than 10,000 pre-built Ansible Playbooks and more than 1,000 integration modules can now be directly used in Red Hat CloudForms, delivered as IT services and used for policy enforcement and compliance.

Joe Fitzgerald, Vice-President, Management, Red Hat, said, “Ansible has become a strategic technology with increased adoption and community growth with industry-leading automation capabilities. Driving native Ansible support into Red Hat CloudForms was an obvious next step to provide a higher degree of automation in a multi-cloud management solution. Red Hat CloudForms already provided comprehensive cloud management capabilities and with native Ansible support, we take it a step further with human-readable automation language, greatly simplifying the building of solutions to deploy, manage, optimize and bolster security for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.”

Red Hat CloudForms 4.5 is expected to be generally available in the Red Hat Customer Portal.