Made generally available in July, Ascender leverages open source Ansible AWX and includes a full suite of turn-key, supported, open source Ansible playbooks created and maintained by CIQ. Ascender 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 this rollout, CIQ is responding to community demand by simplifying the deployment of an automation platform, ensuring accessibility for a broader audience. As always, CIQ is available to help clients with larger and/or supported deployments.

“Our goal for Ascender is to lower the barrier to entry for infrastructure automation by making it possible for operators to automate their enterprise infrastructure on any platform in minutes, whether they are Kubernetes experts or have never even used Linux,” said Greg Sowell, principal solutions engineer at CIQ. “Today, you can go to GitHub and automatically deploy the Ascender installer on an Enterprise Linux system via Kubernetes, without having to sort through all the prerequisites and with clear documentation to guide you through the process, if you need it. This will include an installer for Amazon EKS, and we’ll continue to roll out automated Ascender deployments for every platform our customers need. We want to enable everyone to run Ascender wherever they want and minimize their time to value.”

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 a built-in reporting capability to track patching and current state for Rocky Linux and Windows servers. Ascender’s web-based GUI and REST API allow 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.

“If you’re running automation at scale from the command line with Ansible, you have little control,” adds Sowell. “Plus, it can be difficult to track changes, such as who has done what and when, capture any failures and successes, or implement least-privilege access. Ascender does all that for you. And whereas other automation platforms charge by the number of devices, Ascender offers a price point that is much more amenable to customers running automation at scale, so there’s no more counting nodes.”

*Availability*
The Ascender installer is available now at the Ascender Installer Github repository, along with simple instructions to walk users through an install. Users can add Ascender to an existing Kubernetes cluster or automatically set up a new one.

CIQ has tested the Ascender Installer on K3s, the lightweight Kubernetes distribution fully certified by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and will soon support more Kubernetes flavors, starting with Amazon EKS.

*About CIQ*
CIQ builds secure, reliable and open infrastructure solutions at scale, with dedicated world-class support for a range of performance intensive computing and enterprise technologies. From the base operating system, through containers, orchestration, provisioning, computing and up to cloud applications, CIQ works with every part of the technology stack enabling organizations to focus on their core competencies, driving business-transforming innovation. CIQ is the founding support and services partner of Rocky Linux and the creator of the next generation federated computing stack. For more information, please visit ciq.com.

Media Contact

Cristin Connelly Zegers, Cathey Communications for CIQ, +1 404-931-6752, [email protected], www.ciq.com

SOURCE CIQ