How to master the journey toward an Intelligent Enterprise

Many large-scale enterprises have begun to adopt the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. In some cases, the usage is ad-hoc at the lab level. In others, Ansible automation has been institutionalized across the whole IT ecosystem. As enterprises try to make the jump from ad-hoc to widespread usage of Ansible automation, they often stumble and don’t fully achieve their automation goals.

In this session, we investigate some of the most common reasons for failed adoption and how you can mitigate the risk of failure. Areas covered will be centered around the 3 pillars that affect your IT evolution: culture, process, and technology. We’ll focus on addressing how Ansible Automation Platform can help overcome institutional challenges.

Discover how you can go from digital transformation to an Intelligent Enterprise with automated processes and integrated data for business analytics supporting better business decisions. Hear from our experienced partner GPA Group on how customers mastered their journey around the SAP S/4HANA migration successfully, and used tools to automate their business and infrastructure processes while integrating data for analytics.

Ansible's simple automation framework means that previously isolated network administrators can finally speak the same language of automation as the rest of the IT organization, extending the capabilities of Ansible to include native support for both legacy and open network infrastructure devices. Network devices and systems can now be included in an organization's overall automation strategy for a holistic approach to application workload management.

How can Red Hat automation support SAP customers during their journey towards the Intelligent Enterprise, in adopting SAP S/4HANA? During this session, Steve Delien, Global CTA for SAP on Cloud at Accenture Technology, will present Accenture's view, solutions, services, and accelerators to realise the opportunity of the Intelligent Enterprise. He will also address the importance of the strategic partnership between Red Hat and Accenture, and more specifically, what value this brings to SAP customers in their digital transformation journey.

Ansible Automation by Red Hat helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical inventory management. And Tower's REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes.

The Operator SDK supports 3 ways of implementing your app's operational knowledge: using Go, Helm, or Ansible. A compiled language like Go is usually faster than an interpreted language like Ansible and Python. But how much does it matter when implementing an Operator? How much speed is sacrificed for faster iterations and easier maintenance?

We tried to answer these questions by benchmarking Operators written with the three Operator SDK types to manage the life cycle of a large number of application custom resources on a cluster. We then looked at ways to optimize execution speed of Ansible-enabled Operators to close the speed gaps with the other types of Operators.

In this session, we’ll present our findings, lessons learned, and ways to optimize execution speed with development efficiency. You’ll see how to evaluate these tradeoffs for their own clusters.

This session is presented by:
Timothy Appnel Senior Product Manager, Ansible
Fabian von Feilitzsch Senior Software Engineer, OpenShift
James Cammarata Software Engineering Manager
Jeff Geerling Owner

In this session, CEPSA will share their automation journey. From their first tactical approach, to use in their main project, SAP HANA migration, to an AWS space.

CEPSA is a global, integrated company operating across the entire oil and gas value chain. They are present in more than 28 countries. The culture of innovation is one of their hallmarks. They use technology and research to generate value, be more competitive, optimize processes, and improve the efficiency and quality of their products--this is why they are involved in IT automation.

David Liras, Head of Digital Platforms, will walk through the initial implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for security automation and then use it in a SAP HANA migration project. They will explain the benefits of automation that they extended to all IT projects, creating an automation culture across the organization.

We as a DevSecOps team are responsible to provide Platform as a Service capability to many engineering teams. Services offered by our team are used by internal engineering teams for their development, build and CI/CD platform.

Below listed are the major challenges we had in addition to supporting different infrastructure verticals with multiple product stacks and varying skillset requirement.

Maintain Product Security, Subscription and New Feature Compliance
Frequent Product Upgrades & Migration – Seamless, Availability
Various Deployment Requirements – Standalone, Clustered, DMZ
Application Integration and Consistency
Easy to Repeat and Scalable model
Support more Services with less resources

Our answer to this growing problem was ‘IaC - Infrastructure as Code’. Watch this session to learn about how we developed a solution with following characteristics.

Easy to start with minimal learning curve
Idempotent
Usability
Testable
Agentless
Repeatable Model

In this session we will also share overview of how we were able to increase our team by 300% after resource-bump in no time while keeping our main areas of focus unaffected which are supporting, maintaining, upgrading and monitoring our services.

Using the benefits of new technologies is a key factor for the future success of every company. In this session, discover how the move to S/4HANA can be an opportunity to transform with help from Red Hat. Learn how Red Hat’s open source solutions, together with its partners and their expertise, can make your migration journey more manageable and provide the flexibility your business needs to stay competitive for years to come.

Featuring:
Michel Isnard, VP EMEA Sales, Red Hat
Will Watkins, EMEA Transformation Sales Lead, Red Hat
Val Yonchev, Senior Manager, Consulting Services, Red Hat

As cyber attackers continue to focus more and more on government agencies and their partners, the stakes keep increasing. Whether a rogue attacker or a nation state, these organizations hold both sensitive data and the keys to critical infrastructure. Defending the global networks that keep these organizations running is critical and complex. In this session, we’ll provide insights into how a leading defense contractor uses automation to ensure the secure configuration and maintenance of their network’s switches and routers. With thousands of devices, the challenge was daunting, but with the credentials for the network devices already being managed and secured through a strong privileged access management program, we’ll discuss how the Ansible team was able to rapidly develop playbooks to use these credentials to automate the configuration process, and rapidly rotate device passwords based on policy or an incident. This approach not only helped to secure the network and the data passing through it, but also to more easily meet audit and compliance requirements--a win/win. Throughout this session, we’ll discuss all the challenges facing this organization, how using a combination of privileged access management and Red Hat Ansible Tower provided significant business benefits, and tips and tricks on how other organizations can do the same.

Ansible Automation by Red Hat helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Centralize and control your IT infrastructure with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, integrated notifications and graphical inventory management. And Tower's REST API and CLI make it easy to embed Tower into existing tools and processes.

The easiest way to manage your Red Hat infrastructure for efficient and compliant IT operations. Establish trusted content repos and processes that help you build a standards-based, secure Red Hat environment.

Containers and Kubernetes are becoming the de facto standard for building, delivering, and managing modern, cloud-native applications. Many Kubernetes solutions are available, making it difficult to evaluate them all. So how do you select a container platform? What’s really important?

Join this webinar to hear about fundamental concepts to help you navigate the crowded and often confusing container platform marketspace. This webinar will help prepare you to make the best container orchestration infrastructure decision for your organization’s cloud-native applications—and accelerate innovation to better serve your customers.

We’ll discuss:
• The what, how, who, and why of selecting a container orchestration infrastructure.
• The relationship between Linux® and containers.
• Different options available to your organization if you want to move to Kubernetes for container orchestration.
• Container orchestration myths—debunking some and demystifying others.

Experts speaking:
Andrew Clay Shafer, Vice President, Global Transformation Office, Red Hat
Dan Juengst, Sr. Principal Product Manager, Hybrid Cloud, Red Hat
Josh Berkus, Kubernetes Community Manager, Red Hat

CarMax, the nation’s largest retailer of used cars, uses Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform to automate the infrastructure that supports critical applications. In this session, Christian Emery, Manager of Enterprise Systems at CarMax, will walk through CarMax’s journey to implement Ansible Automation Platform. We will explore how a do-it-yourself IT approach evolved into an efficient, standardized automation platform that helps the organization innovate. Christian will demonstrate how the people, processes, and technology changes CarMax made established a path to faster delivery, accelerated return on investment, and created a foundation for modern DevOps practices. See how CarMax started and scaled an automation project, along with the necessary process considerations that helped it succeed.

Operators simplify the deployment and management of complex, stateful applications on Kubernetes. One option for writing them is to have knowledge of the language Go and expertise with the internals of Kubernetes. But, there's an alternative to that with a significantly lower barrier to entry. The Operator SDK, one component of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Operator Framework, natively supports building Operators that can run Ansible Playbooks, making it easier for Operator development and integrating seamlessly with existing Ansible workflows and tooling.

Automating backbone capacity augments with Ansible Automation Platform has inspired more Cox network engineers to embrace automation and identify potential opportunities within their role to reduce human error, increase efficiency, and improve the quality of work.