3 reasons to use Ansible automation at the network edge

Edge computing comes with challenges you may not have to address elsewhere in your environment. The proven solution for addressing these challenges is using automation to manage, orchestrate, and maintain your environment at the edge of the network. Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform can help you address these challenges.

Edge computing adds unique security threats that can be difficult to handle in distributed locations with little IT staff or physical security.

Ansible Automation Platform security automation integrates and coordinates supported standalone security platforms, helping your team to scale and improve edge tier protection. 

Edge computing requires you to distribute multiple instances of security solutions, such as firewalls and intrusion detection and prevention systems, across edge tiers. With Ansible Automation Platform, your security team can:

• Coordinate processes across security solutions.
• Execute structured, auditable, and repeatable actions spanning the edge of the network.
• Share approved, predefined automation across your organization using controller surveys and the automation services catalog.

The result is a reduction in error-prone manual actions.

Ansible Automation Platform also helps you extend the reach of your security measures across all your edge environments, augmenting your existing security information and event management (SIEM) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) tools.

Automation helps your team respond to events consistently across the edge of the network and to configure and support edge automation scenarios at scale, reducing the risk of human error or tampering.

Edge solutions face critical challenges in addressing environmental variability and providing interoperability across vendors and technologies. 

Ansible Automation Platform supports multiple operating systems so that you can automate across heterogeneous edge environments, including:

• Public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures.
• Multivendor and multidomain architectures.

This automation is supported by certified Ansible content from Red Hat and more than 55 certified partners.

With Ansible Automation Platform, you can ensure effective integrations, particularly in production environments, by bundling automation content dependencies at the development stage. This portability results in efficient development life-cycles and reliable, consistent execution when you reach production.

IT processes can be simplified by managing the services needed to deliver edge solutions with automated workflows, including:

• Troubleshoot and support ticketing workflows.
• Internal and external notifications.
• Approval workflows.

Developers can build, run, and manage applications using their preferred tools and processes.

One of the biggest challenges with edge computing is the need to manage many nodes and clusters, and the data streams they generate in locations with little IT resource support.

Ansible Automation Platform makes scalability, provisioning, and infrastructure management efficient by providing a flexible architecture that adapts to your organization’s needs.

With Ansible Automation Platform, you get control, visibility, and management for hundreds to thousands of edge locations. You can deploy systems and applications where it is best suitable for your organization—even in remote locations—which helps your IT team to scale operations and management as rapidly as your architecture scales. 

Ansible Automation Platform’s automation mesh executes automation closer to your target endpoints for remote datacenters, edge devices, or other geographically dispersed endpoints. You can scale automation across complex networks for multiple geographies and environments, such as datacenters, cloud environments, and the edge of the network.

The ability to remotely configure and support edge automation provides multiple benefits, such as:

• Reduced risk of human error.
• Prevention of deliberate or accidental tampering.
• Minimized need for on-site support.

Ansible Automation Platform architecture can rapidly and independently scale the control and execution of local and remote automation workloads with little or no downtime. 

In addition, Ansible Automation Platform’s automation controller provides role-based access control, logging, and identity management integration that defines and executes your automation. Automation mesh, centrally managed through automation controller, delivers automation across environments with a security-focused approach.