Ascender CIQ Solution Brief

Whether you’re dealing with public clouds, devices, or enterprise-level workloads, Ascender’s comprehensive feature set is geared to make infrastructure management less of a maze and more of a well-marked path towards success.

Ascender Enables Enterprise Infrastructure Automation at Scale

Whether you’re managing tens of nodes or tens of thousands, you want the simplest way to provision, configure, and control your cluster, freeing you up to focus on your applications. Warewulf does just that, building on a well-established stateless provisioning paradigm and incorporating containerization workflows to make it easy to manage clusted hardware at scale.

Challenges

Navigating the Labyrinth of Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure management is fraught with obstacles like siloed domain management, repetitive tasks, a lack of centralized auditing, and domain expert bottlenecks. These issues, coupled with the relentless pace of technological evolution, introduce layers of complexity such as managing diverse cloud environments, ensuring cybersecurity, and synchronizing an array of tools and platforms.

Solution: The Ascender Automation Platform

The Ascender Automation Platform is redefining enterprise infrastructure automation. Utilizing Ansible playbooks, it delivers turnkey solutions that enable effective, safe, and scalable automation. Whether applying patches, security hardening, or other changes to a multitude of servers or devices, Ascender puts control at your fingertips or within an API call. Designed to oversee automation across Rocky Linux workloads, networking devices, Windows servers, public clouds, and more, Ascender builds on open-source Ansible AWX. It enhances integration support with ready-made playbooks for hassle-free deployment of entire solution stacks. With Ansible’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach, automating manual IT processes, provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration becomes accessible.

Ascender is now available on GitHub. You can access and contribute to the Ascender project on its GitHub repository.

Benefits

Streamlined Management and Organization

Through centralized platform management, Ascender simplifies the process of defining and organizing inventories, playbooks, and variables. This efficiency leads to reduced time and effort spent managing automation tasks.

Robust Security and Compliance

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) ensures that only authorized personnel have access to specific resources, maintaining security, and adherence to compliance regulations.

Flexible Integration Options

Ascender’s REST API provides a bridge to third-party applications and services, allowing for a seamless blend of tools within a broader system architecture.

Automated Scheduling and Real-time Monitoring

By scheduling jobs and providing 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 enables the creation of sophisticated automation sequences, ensuring that multi-step processes can be completed more quickly and with less potential for human error.

Facilitated Collaboration and Consistency

Integration with version control systems like Git ensures that teams can work together efficiently, maintaining consistency and version history across different stages of a project.

Transparent Auditing and Insightful Reporting

Ascender’s auditing and reporting capabilities provide a clear trail of what changes were made and by whom, providing invaluable insights for future planning, troubleshooting, and compliance verification.

Cost Savings

By automating repetitive tasks and centralizing management, Ascender can reduce the need for manual labor and potential errors, translating to cost savings for the organization.

Scalability

Ascender’s features allow for automation to be applied at various scales, ensuring that the organization’s growing needs can be met without significant changes to the underlying architecture.

Features

Centralized Platform Management

Ascender provides a web-based GUI that allows users to define and organize inventories, playbooks, and variables.

Role-Based Access Control

Ascender enables 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.

REST API

Ascender provides a browsable REST API, which allows third-party applications and/or services to integrate with Ascender.

Scheduling and Job Monitoring

Ascender allows users to schedule Ansible jobs to run at specific times or intervals. It provides a job monitoring interface that displays realtime logs, status updates, and executed job results.

Workflow Automation

Ascender provides a visual workflow editor, allowing users to create complex automation workflows by chaining multiple Ansible playbooks. This helps automate multi-step processes, such as application deployments, system configurations, and infrastructure provisioning.

Collaboration and Version Control

Ascender integrates with version control systems like Git, enabling collaboration among multiple users or teams working on Ansible projects.

Auditing and Reporting

Ascender keeps track of all executed Ansible jobs, maintaining an audit trail of changes made to infrastructure and configurations.

Enterprises can now use Ascender to automate tedious tasks at scale and eliminate the bottlenecks that plague application users and infrastructure administrators alike. 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.

Zane Hamilton, SVP of Sales at CIQ