Our Open Source Approach to Ascender and More (Coming Soon)

August 8, 2023

At CIQ, our dedication to open source forms an integral part of our operational ethos, so we're thrilled to make the sources to our Ascender platform available to all.

The Open Source Model: Doing Right by Our Customers

Being a company in open source is not just about building and sharing code; it's about doing what's best for both our customers and the community alike. Everyone in the open source community is equally important and critical, from active contributors to casual consumers; we are committed to supporting everyone. By embracing the open source model, we invite the global tech community to inspect, critique, and improve upon our work.

It’s important to us that we don't own or control any open source communities that we create or contribute to. Instead, we ask the community itself to lead and decide on the fate of those initiatives. It is our role to be a contributor to open source communities, adding value both to the community at large as well as any business offerings we build around that open source project. Our aim is to cultivate an environment where each of our open source projects can flourish into a vibrant and collaborative community, and when we see that maturation occur, we are committed to empowering the community to take over for that project, as we have done with Apptainer, Warewulf, and Rocky Linux.

If you love something, set it free.

Ascender: Now Available on the CIQ GitHub Repository

Our CIQ GitHub repository serves as a hub where we publish, maintain, and accept contributions to open source projects. One of the newest projects available on our GitHub account is Ascender. This new project governs the automation of Rocky Linux management at scale as well as workloads, networking, devices, public clouds, and other infrastructure at an enterprise level. The platform builds upon open source Ansible AWX, providing structure to implement enterprise infrastructure automation securely and at scale. Ascender harnesses the power of Ansible AWX and enriches it with integration support, a ledger, and turnkey playbooks for simplified deployment of entire solution stacks. Ascender is tightly integrated with CIQ Mountain, our platform for hybrid data center management and security.

To view Ascender's open source code, head on over to the CIQ GitHub repository. There, you'll find everything you need to implement the turnkey Ansible playbooks that Ascender uses to automate and simplify enterprise infrastructure management tasks, including provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration.

Cool Tools That Work with Ascender

Beyond the core Ascender offering, there are several tools that integrate with Ascender. This ecosystem of solutions empowers users to leverage the full power of automation, enabling infrastructure teams to track changes, reduce costs, and increase productivity.

Ascender fits seamlessly into the tools you already use, including but not limited to:

ServiceNow
Jira
BMC Remedy
Infoblox
Netbox
VMWare vSphere
Hashicorp Vault
Hashicorp Terraform
Hashicorp Packer
CyberArk Conjur
Delinea Secret Server
dynaTrace
GitHub
Gitlab
Atlassian Bitbucket
Apache Subversion
Thycotic / Delinea

…and Ascender also can manage (but is not limited to):

Google Cloud Platform
Amazon Web Services
Microsoft Azure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Windows Servers
Cisco ACI
…and many more!

Applying Pull Requests to the CIQ GitHub Account

We also encourage collaboration and contributions from the tech community at large. If you have an enhancement or a bug fix to any of our open source projects, feel free to submit a pull request to our CIQ GitHub account. Our team is dedicated to reviewing and integrating suitable changes promptly.

Open Source: Shaping the Future of Enterprise Software Innovation

As collaboration among global developers becomes increasingly easier, we look forward to seeing the many amazing open source projects that will emerge over the next few years. Through Ascender and other open source projects that we contribute to, such as Rocky Linux, Apptainer, and Warewulf, we're demonstrating how open source can shape the future of enterprise software infrastructure. We invite you to explore our GitHub repository, check out our open source projects, and join us on this exciting journey.