We’re excited to announce the availability of Ansible Actions Open Beta in IBM Cloud Schematics. 

You can now run Ansible playbooks against your inventory of IBM Cloud resources, all directly within IBM Cloud Schematics.

What is Ansible?

Ansible (originally developed by Red Hat) is an open-source software-provisioning, configuration-management and application-deployment tool enabling Infrastructure as Code. For example, you can use Ansible to do the following:

• Deploy application code on VSIs (such as on VPC Gen 2)
• Install OS updates on VMs
• Configure IBM Cloud resources post-provisioning
• Deploy applications to managed Kubernetes clusters (such as IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service)

Learn more about Ansible with the following video:

How does Schematics enable Ansible?

Ansible and IBM Cloud Schematics are complementary solutions enabling end-to-end infrastructure automation with code. Schematics is a hosted solution that allows teams to collaborate, and it has built-in security, governance and auditability.

Schematics enables you to import Ansible playbooks, define input configuration and control the lifecycle of Ansible automation. Specifically, a Schematics action enables the following:

• Configuring the GitHub repository where your Ansible playbook resides
• Defining the resource inventory you want to run the playbook against
• Executing Ansible playbooks in repeatable and consistent manner

How do Terraform and Ansible work together in Schematics?

Schematics supports two primary approaches to automation: Workspaces (Terraform-based) and Actions (Ansible-based). Whereas Terraform is primarily used for provisioning, Ansible excels at configuration management and application deployment. Together, Terraform and Ansible are a perfect match for end-to-end infrastructure automation.

In the future, we are planning to provide tools that enable users to connect the output of Schematics  Workspaces to Actions. For example, you can expect to dynamically run Ansible Actions against resources provisioned by a Terraform-based workspace.

How can I get started today?

Check out the following resources:

• IBM Cloud Schematics
• IBM Cloud Docs: Getting started with IBM Cloud Schematics and Ansible
• Tutorial: Deploy an application to an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Cluster
• Tutorial: Start/Stop/Reboot a VSI on VPC in IBM Cloud
• Tutorial: Deploy LAMP Stack on a VSI on VPC in IBM Cloud

Questions or comments? You can reach me at svennam@us.ibm.com.