This article seeks to explain the use of State Machines in Red Hat CloudForms for the use in the flow control of automation.
The topic of State Machines is sometimes perceived as rocket science, barely used but often taught. The first thing to dispel is the complexity in state machines, then we can compare how a state machine differs from other process automation like Workflows.
Finally the article is to dispel the myth that State Machines are RUBY or if you use Ansible Automation Inside you do not need state machines, again not a true statement.
With this short video, we start a series based on Red Hat Knowledge Base articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible automation inside Red Hat CloudForms.
In this first video we show:
Today marks the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.5, as announced in the recent Press Release. One of the key highlights of the release is the introduction of Ansible Automation Inside, which provides a simple, powerful, human readable automation language, directly accessible from within CloudForms.
In addition, several enhancements are added to the multi-cloud management platform, including a new storage provider for Amazon Web Services, metrics and container improvements for OpenShift, and additional features for OpenStack. Let’s take a look at some of these improvements.
CloudForms 4.5 marks a huge new direction for Cloud Management and Automation, in that CloudForms can now run an Ansible Playbook natively as a Service, Control Action or Control Alert. We also have some other ways like Custom Buttons and REST API.
One of the challenges of deploying CloudForms to manage a large environment is knowing how to tune it – what knobs to turn and dials to watch for.
Red Hat’s Systems Engineering team have just completed a document entitled “Deploying CloudForms at Scale”. This describes the architectural components that affect large-scale deployment, and details the monitoring, troubleshooting and scaling measures that can be taken to optimally tune each component.
In this article we will deploy the CloudForms appliance in the Azure cloud. Red Hat provides CloudForms as an appliance. For Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure, Red Hat provides a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) as a dynamic disk. Azure, unfortunately, does not support dynamic disks. In order to import the CloudForms appliance into Azure, we need to convert the appliance VHD to a fixed disk.
Keeping the whole IT team informed about events or actions in your IT infrastructure can be challenging. Many IT teams have turned to team messaging applications, like Slack, to improve internal team communications. CloudForms, with its flexible integration capabilities, can be connected to Slack to notify the team whenever important events happen.
I spent the last decade working with virtualization platforms and the certifications and accreditation’s that go along with them. During this time, I thought I understood what it meant to run an efficient data center. After six months of working with Red Hat CloudForms, a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), I now wonder what was I thinking. I encountered every one of the problems below, each are preventable with the right solution. Remember, we live in the 21st century–shouldn’t the software that we use act like it?
Over the past year, several analysts looked at Red Hat and its Cloud management Platform (CMP) solution, Red Hat CloudForms, to provide their point of view. The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, finding that Red Hat as a company was positioned for success and recognizing Red Hat CloudForms as a leading product that delivered substantial savings in both cost and efficiency. In this post, we provide a brief round-up of the various analysts’ reports.
