Provisioning

Automate, manage and connect all stages of an application lifecycle

From traditional bare metal through to serverless or function-as-a-service, automating the provisioning of any infrastructure is the first step in automating the operational life cycle of your applications. Ansible can provision the latest cloud platforms, virtualized hosts and hypervisors, network devices and bare-metal servers.

After bootstrapping, nodes can be connected to storage, added to a load balancer, security patched or any number of other operational tasks by separate teams. In essence Ansible becomes the connecting tool in any of your process pipelines – taking bare infrastructure right through to day to day management, automatically.

Provisioning with Ansible allows you to seamlessly transition into configuration management, orchestration and application deployment using the same simple, human readable, automation language.

Infrastructure Platforms

Underneath virtualization and cloud platforms there is always the physical server. When it's your own cloud or hypervisor system you still need to provision bare metal some of the time. Ansible integrates with many datacenter management tools to both invoke and enact the provisioning steps required.

Hypervisors, virtual storage and virtual networks – the transition from physical devices as the base platform has opened up increasingly diverse scenarios at previously unavailable scale. Tame the complexity with Ansible to simplify the experience of cross platform management. The large selection of available modules gives you the flexibility and choice to manage your diverse environment.

Networks

Ansible Network Automation allows users to configure, validate and ensure continuous compliance for physical network devices. Ansible is the only language that can easily provision across multi-vendor environments, often replacing the need for manual processes that exist across network environments.

Storage

Ansible can provision and manage the storage in your infrastructure. From software-defined  storage, cloud based storage, or even hardware storage appliances, you can find a module to leverage Ansible’s common, powerful language.

Cloud

Ansible is packaged with hundreds of modules supporting services on the largest public cloud platforms. Compute, storage and networking modules allow playbooks to directly provision these services. Ansible can even act as an orchestrator of other popular provisioning tools, giving you a high level, self documented, workflow.

One of the easiest ways to deploy, configure and orchestrate OpenStack private cloud is using Ansible. Ansible can be used to provision the underlying infrastructure, install services, add compute hosts, and more. Once the underlying environment is provisioned, Ansible can also be used provision resources, services, and applications inside of your cloud.

Self-Service with Ansible Tower

Red Hat Ansible Tower helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical inventory management. And Ansible Tower's REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Ansible Tower into existing tools and processes.