Harnessing the power of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for IBM Maximo Application Suite on AWS

IBM^® Maximo^® Application Suite (MAS) is a comprehensive enterprise asset management solution (EAM) designed to help organizations manage their physical assets, such as buildings, vehicles and equipment, throughout their lifecycle. It provides tools for maintenance management, inventory management, procurement and work order management, all within a single platform. Maximo supports various industries, including manufacturing, energy and transportation, enabling efficient asset tracking, predictive maintenance and compliance with regulatory standards.

There are different ways to deploy MAS on Red Hat® OpenShift®. Today, we’re focusing on the deployment of MAS on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) by using the Ansible DevOps Collection. Currently, running this collection requires executing Ansible scripts or commands on local machines, which might lack transparency and auditability about what configuration was made and by whom. It also doesn’t support teams seeking a centralized configuration that can be shared and replicated easily. That’s where Red Hat Ansible Automation comes in.

Setting up MAS is a vast process that involves deploying and configuring numerous components. An example of this setup is shown in the architecture diagram, which illustrates how the MAS components are deployed on ROSA:

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) is a unified solution for strategic automation. It combines the security, features, integrations and flexibility needed to scale automation across domains, orchestrate essential workflows and optimize IT operations. It integrates multiple tools and features to facilitate consistent, scalable automation, enabling organizations to optimize their IT operations and adopt enterprise AI effectively. The platform supports a wide range of use cases, from automating routine tasks to orchestrating complex workflows, making it a versatile choice for enhancing operational efficiency and security.

Deploying MAS using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform gives you full control over the deployment and configuration of the MAS solution. It also allows you to use the capabilities of the Ansible Automation Platform to support deployment by orchestrating off-cluster resources, cloud operations, business continuity and lifecycle management. This automation simplifies the installation of MAS on the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA). While MAS is supported on other Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) environments, our focus here is on deploying MAS through Ansible Automation Platform on ROSA.

IBM provides an Ansible Automation Platform Execution Environment container image as part of the Ansible DevOps GitHub repository. The execution environment image for Ansible DevOps builds on the latest ansible-automation-platform-24/ee-supported-rhel9 image from Red Hat that provides the Ansible Core, any Python dependencies and Red Hat supported collections. The Ansible DevOps ee-image includes the IBM MAS DevOps collection and all the required client libraries to function.

The image is uploaded to quay.io for consumption by the Ansible Automation Platform. Details on how to set up and configure Ansible Automation Platform can be found in the documentation.

With Ansible Automation Platform configured with the MAS Execution Environment, you can now run your own playbooks to use the roles provided in the collection. The documentation offers some examples of playbooks to install and configure MAS on ROSA. The ability to control your company playbooks through source control and execute them in Ansible Automation Platform allows for a more customized and powerful way to deploy and configure MAS.

The use of Ansible Automation Platform and the MAS Execution Environment doesn’t stop at the installation and configuration of MAS. It also extends to running Day 2 operations such as backup or restore, which uses the existing roles provided in the MAS DevOps Ansible Collection and installed libraries.

As the MAS Execution Environment is built from the official Red Hat-supported execution environment, it means that the same container image will have access to all the supported collections from Red Hat. This capability allows for more sophisticated jobs and workflows to be set up in Ansible Automation Platform. As a result, jobs related to setting up your AWS resources, such as subnets or firewalls, can be included alongside the jobs for configuring MAS.

To learn more about the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Service in AWS Marketplace, visit the page here. You can also watch a demo video covering a core automation use case for AWS, deploying and retiring cloud resources. Try the hands-on, self-paced Ansible Automation Platform in AWS labs. There are multiple labs covering these topics:

• Infrastructure Visibility (Infrastructure awareness and reporting on AWS)
• Cloud Operations (Day 2 operations on AWS)
• Infrastructure Optimization (Cloud control on AWS)

For hands-on, self-paced labs on Ansible Automation Platform, look at these resources, or take a look at the Ansible Automation Platform documentation. Once you are familiar with Ansible Automation Platform, you can use it to leverage the MAS Ansible collection and MAS Execution Environment to help deploy and manage your MAS environments.

Max out your asset value: Maximo Application Suite