Efficient and reliable deployment processes are essential for maintaining a competitive edge and operational excellence. At Red Hat, we've embraced innovative tools to enhance our deployment workflows, particularly for edge computing environments.
Leveraging the components of our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, including Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant and Event-Driven Ansible, we streamlined the deployment of our Cool Stuff Store's new kiosks located in Dublin and Johannesburg.
We also explored how this approach integrates seamlessly into the broader Red Hat DevOps platform, showcasing the synergy between various tools and processes.
Expanding the Cool Stuff Store to the edge
As the Cool Stuff Store expands, the need to deploy new kiosks at edge locations like Dublin and Johannesburg became critical. Edge computing requires robust and efficient deployment solutions due to the limited infrastructure and remote nature of these locations.
The challenge was to deploy container images reliably and efficiently, especially when the Cool Stuff Store platform engineering team lacked extensive expertise in crafting Ansible playbooks.
With the capabilities of Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant, the platform engineering team was able to generate Ansible playbooks, greatly facilitating the deployment automation process.
Why Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant?
Ansible Lightspeed with IBM watsonx Code Assistant simplifies the creation of Ansible playbooks by utilizing generative AI. This tool removes the guesswork and leverages the built-in expertise of IBM watsonx foundation models, trained on Ansible best practices, to generate high quality playbooks from natural-language prompts.
By turning platform engineers into subject matter experts, it helped convert their expertise into trusted, reliable Ansible code, accelerating the adoption of automation across teams.
Deploying with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
With the Ansible playbooks in place, the platform engineers turned their focus to the Ansible Automation Platform’s automation controller user interface(UI). Within the UI, they can not only deploy their containers but can take advantage of:
- Dynamic inventories: Configured dynamic inventories allow the platform engineers not only to setup their existing Dublin and Johannesburg kiosks, but simplify the process of adding additional kiosks to the deployment process as they come online.
- Automation mesh: With kiosks distributed globally, automation tasks distributed across execution nodes closer to the target kiosks helped ensure faster and more reliable deployments.
- Notifications: Capturing real-time status updates to alert upon the success or failure of the container deployments,
- Workflow Visualizer: Via the use of Workflow Job Templates within Ansible Automation Platform, the platform engineers could visualize the step-by-step process of deploying their container deployments across their globally distributed kiosks.
Real-time inventory updates with Event-Driven Ansible
Despite the successful deployments of the Cool Stuff Store, the platform engineering team still faced a challenge in figuring out how they could update their kiosk stores when new inventories of merchandise become available. To solve this, they turned to Event-Driven Ansible (EDA) for the solution.
With the assistance of EDA, the platform engineers were able to use EDA to listen for specific events, such as the availability of new container images in their Red Hat Quay repositories. As new inventories of merchandise were made available to the kiosk stores, new container images were created via the Red Hat OpenShift pipeline and pushed to their Quay repositories. Once the images were pushed to the Quay repositories, this triggered an EDA event which kicked off an Ansible Workflow Template to run automation against all the distributed kiosks and update their corresponding inventory. This process ensured that inventory updates were deployed to all the kiosks without any manual intervention.
Video: Red Hat DevOps platform demo
Watch the following video demo to see this solution in action.
Conclusion
By leveraging key automation components that make up Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform such as Ansible Lightspeed with watsonx Code Assistant and Event Driven Ansible, we were able to streamline the deployment process of the Cool Stuff Store’s edge kiosks.
This approach not only reduced the need for deep expertise in Ansible playbook creation but ensured real-time inventory updates across all the distributed kiosks globally.
The integration of these tools into our broader Red Hat DevOps platform demonstrates the power of automation and AI in enhancing our operational efficiency and reducing manual overhead.
From inner loop deployments to outer loop deployments, the Red Hat DevOps platform provides a cohesive, efficient, and security-forward solution for modern application development and deployment across multiple types of environments including at the edge.
