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CIQ Launches 'Ascender' to Enable Automation of Complex Infrastructure Changes with the Click of a Button or an API Call

Ascender platform helps enterprises use Ansible-based infrastructure automation effectively, securely and at scale.

RENO, Nev., July 27, 2023 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- CIQ, the company building the next generation of software infrastructure for enterprises, announced today that it has launched Ascender, a platform that provides all of the structure to implement enterprise infrastructure automation via turn-key Ansible playbooks—effectively, securely and at scale.

Ascender leverages open source Ansible AWX and includes a full suite of turn-key, supported, open source Ansible playbooks created and maintained by CIQ. It governs the automation of Rocky Linux management at scale as well as workloads, networking, devices, public clouds and other infrastructure at an enterprise level. Ascender is integrated with CIQ Mountain, the company's platform for hybrid data center management and security. Mountain reduces complexity, enhances agility and optimizes return on investment for enterprise Linux applications, solutions and support at scale. Ascender can also integrate with existing Ansible deployments without using Mountain. Similarly, it can be used with or without Rocky Linux. In fact Windows users, network teams and security teams can apply the automation capabilities of Ascender even if they are not users of any other CIQ resources.

With Ascender, CIQ has taken the engine of open source Ansible and built the rest of the automobile around it, so that you can just get in your luxury vehicle, so to speak, and start your journey to automation in comfort and safety, knowing CIQ is there all the way as your on-call support.

With Ascender, a single administrator can apply complex patches, security hardening standards or other changes to a fleet of servers or other devices—with the click of a button or an API call. Ascender also provides built-in reporting capability to track patching and current state for Rocky Linux and Windows servers. Ascender's web-based GUI and REST API allows for easy consumption of automation by end-users who have varying levels of technical expertise and responsibilities. In addition, audit logs and access controls prevent unintended changes and production downtimes as well as help maintain compliance.

"Enterprises can now use Ascender to automate tedious tasks at scale and eliminate the bottlenecks that plague application users and infrastructure administrators alike," said Zane Hamilton, senior vice president of sales at CIQ. "With Ascender, CIQ has taken the engine of open source Ansible and built the rest of the automobile around it, so that you can just get in your luxury vehicle, so to speak, and start your journey to automation in comfort and safety, knowing CIQ is there all the way as your on-call support. We're offering Ascender subscriptions by the administrative seat with no limit to the number of devices you are using, which makes Ascender more cost-effective at scale than other options on the market. If you're already using Ansible AWX, you can easily migrate to Ascender to receive CIQ service and support."

Ascender Leverages the Power of Ansible

Ascender uses open source Ansible AWX and builds upon it with integration support and turn-key playbooks for simple deployment of entire solution stacks. Ansible is widely adopted and arguably the world's most utilized configuration management tool. Ansible uses an infrastructure as code (IaC) approach to enable organizations to automate many IT processes usually performed manually, including provisioning, configuration management, application deployment and orchestration.

Ascender directly addresses numerous challenges faced by infrastructure teams, including:

  • Team silos: Within an enterprise, teams may use different tooling to manage their own domains within the technology stack, making it more difficult for administrators when holistic infrastructure changes need to be made.
  • Repetitive tasks: Teams often perform tedious tasks (such as patching servers) that can be extremely time-consuming at scale. This restricts the time teams could be contributing to business-impacting, revenue-generating work.
  • Lack of centralized audit: Teams largely lack the ability to audit any infrastructure changes, making it difficult to roll back to previous states or track and understand what changes were made, when and by whom.
  • Domain expert bottlenecks: Typically, a select few individuals have the tribal knowledge and/or technical expertise to perform the more complex changes to the infrastructure. As a result, critical work is often paused until these individuals are available to oversee it.

Using Ascender allows teams to reduce time spent on monotonous/repetitive tasks, simplify the execution of more complex tasks, and create audit trails in order to track changes. Ascender also allows teams to create automations separately, but makes bringing together separately developed automations easier for more complex tasks. As a result of these capabilities, Ascender helps enterprises reduce costs and increase productivity.

Highlights of Ascender Features

Centralized management: Ascender offers a centralized platform for managing Ansible automation. It provides a web-based GUI that allows users to define and organize inventories, playbooks and variables. This simplifies the management and organization of Ansible assets, making it easier to maintain and scale automation infrastructure.

Role-based access control (RBAC): Ascender utilizes RBAC, allowing administrators to control access to various resources based on user roles and permissions. This ensures that different users or teams have appropriate access levels and restrictions, enhancing security and compliance.

Auditing and reporting: Ascender keeps track of all executed Ansible jobs, maintaining an audit trail of changes made to infrastructure and configurations. It provides reporting capabilities that allow users to generate detailed reports on job execution, including success/failure status, execution time and output. This helps in compliance, troubleshooting and performance analysis.

REST API: Ascender provides a browsable REST API, which allows third-party applications and/or services to integrate with Ascender. These integrations make it easier for end users to consume automation by using user interfaces they may be more familiar with (such as ServiceNow, Jira and GitHub Actions) and for other services such as CI/CD platforms (CircleCI, for example) to programmatically invoke automations.

Learn More About Ascender Ascender landing page CIQ blog Video: Ascender Overview Live Webinar: "Introducing Ascender," July 27, 11:00am PDT