This first exercise of the lab will guide you through the process of creating a Service Catalog Item utilizing an Ansible Playbook.
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 of CloudForms is 4.7, 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 CloudForms using 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.