Today, every business is a digital business. Technology is your innovation engine, and delivering your applications faster helps you win. Historically, that required a lot of manual effort and complicated coordination. But today, there is Ansible - the simple, yet powerful IT automation engine that thousands of companies are using to drive complexity out of their environments and accelerate DevOps initiatives.
Red Hat CloudForms can integrate with IaaS, PaaS, public and private cloud, and configuration management providers. Since version 4.2 of CloudForms, it can also integrate with Ansible Tower by Red Hat. The latest version which is 4.6, which has an improved “embedded Ansible” role which allows it to run Playbooks, manage credentials and retrieve Playbooks from a source control management like git.
This integration give customers the capability to build Service Catalogs from Ansible Playbooks to allow end users to easily browse, order and manage resources from Ansible. Ansible Playbooks can be used in Control Policies which can not only detect problems, but also automatically fix them. The User Interface of CloudForms can be extended seamless with additional menus and buttons, which utilize Ansible Playbooks to perform user initiated tasks.
One of the features a Cloud Management Platform provides, is a Self Service User Interface. From the Service Catalog users can order, manage and retire Services. Services are categorized in Catalogs, where they can be organized and easily consumed.
By providing a Service Catalog, users can deploy the Services they need quickly and easily. This helps to improve agility, reduce provisioning time and free up resources in internal IT.
But first some basics. Four items are required to make a Service available to users from the CloudForms Self Service Catalog:
Provisioning Dialog
The Provisioning Dialog specifies the list of customizable parameters. For example, when ordering a Virtual Machine, users can specify the number of virtual CPUs, how much memory the VM should have and other parameters. The list of possible parameters is defined in the Provisioning Dialog.
A Service Dialog
When the user orders a Service Catalog Item from the Service Catalog, you might want to allow them to override certain default values. For example, you might allow users to choose from a range of values of how much memory the new Virtual Machine can have. You might want them to only choose from a list of predefined values like 2, 4, or 8 GB of RAM - but not more or less. This is specified in the Service Dialog.
A Service Catalog Item
The Service Catalog Item is what users will see in the Service Catalog and are able to order. It usually consists of a Service Dialog allowing users to change specific parameters, it can have a nice icon and an (optional) HTML description. Service Catalog Items are organized in Service Catalogs for easier navigation.
A Service Catalog
The Service Catalog allows administrator to organize the Catalog Items. You might want to have a Catalog for different Virtual Machine types, or one offering certain applications like Wordpress, MariaDB etc. Or you might want to categorize by Operating System. This is done by creating Service Catalogs and adding Items to them.
We can also use Role Based Access Control to make certain Service Catalog Items available only to specific groups of users.