CERTIFIED INTEGRATION:

Ansible and Citrix ADC

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION & NETWORKING AUTOMATION

Cloud computing is the new normal and many businesses have embraced digital transformation to adapt to rapidly changing markets. At the heart of digital transformation is operational efficiency, speed and lowering the cost and risk of change. DevOps teams are expected to stand up applications quickly and at high frequency. Networking infrastructure teams are challenged to rapidly evolve infrastructure while improving reliability, security and the cost of management. In some cases, the network infrastructure has even become the bottleneck to efficient operations as it is complex and difficult to provision. Implementing and maintaining network configurations in a hybrid cloud environment has added to the challenge.

Network automation helps operations teams automate routing and repetitive tasks such as device configuration. Network automation also lowers the risk of change by reducing the chance of human errors. Infrastructure teams, especially those with a DevOps mindset, have adopted open source automation frameworks like Ansible to reap the benefits of automation. It is helping them focus on the business requirements while speeding up the implementation of their design at low cost and low risk.


AUTOMATION WITH CITRIX ADC

Citrix ADC is a leader in application delivery in a cloud-first world. Likewise, Ansible is a leader in delivering simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up teams for more strategic work. Citrix and Ansible have come together to provide ADC users a simple way to automate and orchestrate the management of physical, virtual and containerized ADC appliances. This integration is done using Citrix ADC’s REST API (called NITRO) and is organized into modules. These modules provide comprehensive support on all ADC platforms and can automate most ADC configuration tasks. Some examples include:

  • Creating and Managing virtual servers
  • Managing SSL/TLS termination and SSL certificate keys
  • Managing content switching, session persistence
  • Configuring and managing global server load balancing (GSLB)
  • Managing Web Application Firewall policies

Accelerate On-prem to Cloud migration:

ADC Ansible playbooks and modules brings version control and portability across different environments. This helps in achieving consistency in your ADC configurations and security polices across distributed ADC infrastructure.

Release Apps Faster:

Ansible can be integrated with existing CI/CD tool so that on successful app deployment, Ansible job can trigger playbooks to make networking config or security changes on your Citrix ADC. This helps applications go live faster with minimal to no human intervention.

 

SOLUTION BENEFITS

The Ansible and Citrix ADC integration provides many benefits:

  • No need for additional software. Purely agentless approach
  • Uses standards-based REST APIs (NITRO) to programmatically manage ADC devices in all form factors and hybrid/multi-cloud deployments 
  • Comprehensive end to end automation and orchestration from initial configuration to application deployment 
  • Reduced application deployment time 
  • Administrator benefits with version control, code portability and promotion, peer review and continuous delivery 
  • Application owners can request ADC configuration changes in Ansible syntax or directly configure ADC as part of complex Ansible orchestration tasks 
  • Simplified management of ADC configurations with flexibility in configuring a specific feature of ADC or configuring an entire enterprise application deployment. Configurations are repeatable, declarative, version-controlled and API-driven

 

Get Started

Explore list of Citrix ADC modules in Ansible Docs.

Contact us for a network automation demo.

Citrix ADC is a Certified Ansible Automation Partner

View Modules

RELATED RESOURCES

Whitepaper

Automate Citrix ADC with Ansible

Download PDF

ansible-quick-start-video.png

Video Demo

Ansible Quick Start - Introduction to Ansible

Watch Video

On Demand Webinar

Automating Your Network with Ansible

Watch Video