Manage Enterprise Infrastructure with Ascender by CIQ

Managing enterprise infrastructure without an automation platform is like trying to build a house with just a hammer and nails — it’s slow, inefficient, and prone to errors. Thankfully, we have excellent, open source tools like Ansible available to make automation fast, easy, dependable, and flexible.

Ascender is a downstream rebuild of Ansible AWX, an open source API, web UI, and task engine for managing and controlling Ansible at an enterprise level. Ascender comes with all the security, stability, and performance features your organization requires, plus some of our own customizations that improve the user experience. Ascender customers get 24/7 enterprise support from CIQ’s team of experts.

Key features of Ascender by CIQ

We’ve worked hard at making Ascender the easiest to deploy Ansible-based automation platform on the market. Designed with large organizations in mind, it offers a unified approach to managing on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments with a diverse mix of hardware and software. Some of the key features of Ascender include:

• Web-based UI with custom improvements: Our user-friendly interface helps you to manage your Ansible playbooks, inventories, credentials, and job execution. It lowers the barrier to entry for Ansible, allowing more team members to contribute.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Get fine-grained control over permissions, granting different levels of access to users and teams, improving security and auditability. No more worrying about junior engineers having the same level of access as your seniors.
• Inventory management: Leverage all the latest dynamic inventory management tools available, group your resources, and organize your systems however you want.
• Credential management: Securely store and retrieve sensitive access credentials (e.g., passwords, SSH keys) and simplify your automation tasks across multiple systems.
• Job scheduling: Automate your playbook execution on a schedule (one-time or recurring) to enhance your consistency and efficiency.

Ascender dashboard shows job execution status, host counts, and more

Ascender advanced features that make your organization more efficient

Beyond the core features are helpful capabilities for new and experienced users alike. Ascender provides increased efficiency, improved consistency, enhanced scalability, tighter security, and a place for centralized collaboration.

• Workflows: Build complex multi-step automation workflows that include approvals, conditional logic, and handling of failures or dependencies.
• REST API: Integrate Ascender with external systems (e.g., workflow automation, CI/CD, monitoring tools) for seamless automation across your entire IT stack.
• Job templates: Save time with reusable templates and enforce your automation standards, making it easy for non-experts to execute safe and approved automation tasks.
• Reporting and logging: Detailed logs and reports on job executions provide visibility, help with troubleshooting, and support compliance audits.
• Notifications: Find out when a job succeeds, fails, or does something out of the ordinary. Get notified via email, webhooks, or your favorite chat-based apps to proactively respond and reduce downtime.
• Scalability: Never worry about running out of resources or performance degradation. Get smooth operations and cost-effective growth with a system that’s easy to scale.
• Multi-tenancy: Optimize your resource utilization and reduce costs by allowing multiple teams or departments to share the same automation environment while maintaining separate operational domains and safely share automations between teams.

Workflows provide resource scaling and sharing

Ascender Installer makes it easy to deploy Ansible anywhere you need it

One of the major challenges of Ansible-based automation platforms is the complexity of deployment. It’s difficult to find product documentation that’s specific to each public cloud, and when you do, it takes hours to perform the deployment.

Ascender Installer is an open source deployment package that can get you up and running in minutes on any Kubernetes platform, whether it’s local, on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud. We’ve made it so you don’t have to be a Kubernetes expert to get your automation up and running. In fact, you don’t even have to be running Kubernetes — the installer takes care of that for you. (Windows and network admins: now is the time to pump your fist in the air.)

You can easily install Ascender on-premises or on popular cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure, OCI) with flexible containerized deployments for Docker and Kubernetes. It’s much easier for non-technical users to get started with automation on Ascender than any other platform.

Ascender provides an elevated experience

Building out an automation platform means much more than writing and deploying playbooks. Once you’re up and running with Ascender, you get intuitive dashboards out of the box that show job status (running, successful, failed), recent job activity, and resource usage.

You also get role-based access control (RBAC), giving you granular permissions for executing playbooks, managing inventories, and more. All of this is based on user roles or team definitions in an IDP. Gone are the days of all-or-nothing access to automation job libraries.

With native cloud platform integrations, you get seamless inventory management. Easily connect to configuration management databases (CMDBs) and external sources for automatic inventory updates. With a thorough inventory, you can tag your resources and put them into logical groupings for targeted playbook execution. Then, define variables at different levels (global, per-host, and per-group).

Additional benefits include:

• Streamlined management and organization: Simplify the process of defining and organizing inventories, playbooks, and variables.
• Robust security and compliance: RBAC ensures that only authorized personnel have access to specific automation jobs and resources.
• Flexible integration: Ascender’s REST API provides a bridge for third-party apps and services, making it easier to blend automation into broader system architecture.
• Automated scheduling and real-time monitoring: Ascender reduces manual oversight and allows teams to quickly respond to issues or updates.
• Comprehensive automation of complex workflows: The visual workflow editor allows you to create sophisticated sequences with multi-step processes.
• Collaboration and consistency: Deep integration with version control systems like git for all your automation development and execution.
• Transparent auditing and reporting: Get a clear audit trail of what changes were made and by whom, useful for planning, troubleshooting, and compliance verification.

Ascender shows detailed job execution output, including log files

Ascender vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP)

The most popular Ansible AWX-based commercial solution is Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP, formerly known as Ansible Tower). AAP is another downstream rebuild of Ansible AWX, but comes with steep, per-node licensing costs that don’t scale well with growing organizations.

Priced anywhere from $75 to $150 per node (with a 100-node minimum), costs skyrocket quickly. Enterprises can easily find themselves paying 6- and even 7-figure annual licensing bills to Red Hat, effectively outpacing the costs of simply hiring additional staff.

Ascender by CIQ offers all the same security, stability, and performance capabilities of AAP but with substantially lower TCO. With Ascender, you don’t need to pay every time your infrastructure needs to grow. We offer 24/7 enterprise support for a reasonable price that gives you the freedom to scale your automation without adding additional costs.

All the automation you need at a much lower cost with Ascender

Automation is crucial for staying competitive. Ascender by CIQ offers a powerful, cost-effective alternative to the traditional solutions from Red Hat, like AAP/Tower. With Ascender, you get all the robust features and capabilities you need to automate complex workflows across your entire enterprise without the hefty price tag. This includes:

• An easy-to-use installer for various environments, even air-gapped environments
• Several UI/UX improvements
• The same security, stability, and performance as AAP

Ascender scales with your needs and offers a user-friendly experience. Because it’s open source, you’re not locked in to expensive licensing agreements. Instead, you can invest in what truly matters: growing your business and optimizing your operations.

Why pay more for automation when you can get everything you need with Ascender at a much more manageable price point? It’s time to rethink what’s possible with your automation strategy and ascend to the next level with Ascender.