CIQ has announced the launch of 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.

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.

Ascender is integrated with CIQ Mountain, the company’s platform for hybrid data center management and security. 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.

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.