This post was originally published on the
XLAB Steampunk blog.
Ansible can automate anything, and cloud is no exception. Automating cloud with Ansible gives your users a chance to simplify management of their existing infrastructure. And when your users benefit, you benefit, too!
Familiarity is underrated
Starting something new is always stressful to some degree (even if we do not want to admit it). And to reduce the stress and make the transition a bit less annoying, we usually want to take something familiar on the journey ahead of us. So, for example, we encourage kids to bring their favorite toy when they start attending kindergarten.
Since many companies already use Ansible for configuration management, it makes sense to bring it into the cloud when migrating. And how does familiarity look in practice? One example would be the migration of the firewall rules. In the on-premise automation scenarios, users either need to configure the firewall using Ansible modules like firewalld. Or maybe they configure the access rules on the networking equipment using one of the networking modules.
If you offer Ansible integration for your cloud, users can take their existing Ansible firewall tasks, replace the firewall module with the security group one, and call it a day. Or, if your cloud infrastructure is simpler, they can directly add the firewall rules to the virtual machine creation.
Boost user experience …
With the Ansible Collection for your cloud, you enable your users to provision, orchestrate and manage compute, network and storage resources with just one reliable tool. That’s invaluable, since customers usually need to use more than one tool to handle all their infrastructure and configuration management requirements, but with the Ansible Collection for your cloud, you give your users a way to rule their entire DevOps workflows using a single, simple, and powerful tool.
You also offer them the chance to automate once and deploy anywhere, since the unified cloud configuration language works across public, private, and hybrid cloud. Ansible Collection enables users to stay on top of compliance requirements, since they can monitor the infrastructure, detect configuration drift, and simplify automation remediation procedures. And the best part - users can just plug the Collection into existing infrastructure and start building transparent configuration management workflows right on top of it.
… Boost your success
It’s obvious that by building Ansible Collection for your product you highly elevate the user experience. Collection speeds up your cloud adoption, simplifies cloud migration from on-prem and other cloud infrastructures to your cloud offering, and basically just fires up the usage of your services.
There are so many benefits Ansible Collection brings to you, we could talk about them for an hour! Oh, wait, that’s exactly what we did at the webinar on Cloud automation with Ansible for cloud providers we had with Red Hat.
So, what now? You’re aware of the benefits of having an Ansible Collection for your cloud, but don’t have the expertise, resources, or simply the time to build it yourself? What if we told you that you can reap all the benefits of the integration without having to develop your own Ansible practice? That’s what we’re here for. Rely on our deep Ansible knowledge, experience, and close collaboration with the Red Hat Ansible engineering and product teams to help you get to market faster, automate your customers’ complex tasks, and increase revenue with certified Ansible Collections we design, develop, certify, support and maintain for you.
The future is now: Gain that competitive edge!
Based on all the above, we dare to say Ansible is one of the best tools for managing cloud resources. We even dare to say Cloud Automation with Ansible is the future. And we also dare to assume you do not wish to be left out of that future. Start making sure you’re a part of it now. Watch our on demand webinar Cloud automation with Ansible for cloud providers and learn all about the benefits of offering your users a chance to automate your cloud with Ansible and see all the ways in which we can help you do that.
