IBM & Red Hat on AWS
Harnessing the power of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for IBM Maximo Application Suite on AWS
Customers have long turned to IBM’s Maximo Application Suite (MAS) as their enterprise asset management (EAM) solution. It’s designed to help organizations efficiently manage their physical assets, such as buildings, vehicles, and equipment, throughout their lifecycle. Maximo provides a unified platform with tools for maintenance management, inventory management, procurement, and work order management.
MAS supports a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, energy, and transportation. It enables effective asset tracking, predictive maintenance capabilities, and compliance with relevant regulatory standards. By consolidating these critical asset management functions into a single system that can be deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), Maximo aims to help organizations optimize the performance and lifespan of their physical resources.
Deployment of IBM Maximo Application Suite
Deploying IBM Maximo Application Suite on ROSA or other platforms can be difficult when done manually due to the complex nature of infrastructure, networking, compute, and security components.
Figure 1: architecture diagram of the MAS components deployed on ROSA
In fact, there are multiple ways to deploy MAS on OpenShift.
Each of these methods require some level of running Ansible scripts or commands on local machines that may lack the required transparency and auditability required by your organization. They also do not cater to teams that utilize a centralized configuration for sharing and repeatability. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform address those needs and more.
What is Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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.
Figure 2: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform components
Deploying MAS via Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform gives you full control over the deployment and configuration of the MAS solution, as well as the capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform to support the deployment by orchestrating off cluster resources, cloud operations, business continuity, and lifecycle management. Automation simplifies the installation of MAS on the Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), which we will focus on in this blog.
Deploy Maximo Application Suite on Red Hat OpenShift on AWS (ROSA) using Ansible Automation Platform
IBM provides an Ansible Automation Platform Execution Environment container image as part of the http://github.com/ibm-mas/ansible-devops/ 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 required client libraries to function.
The image is uploaded to quay.io at quay.io/ibmmas/ansible-devops-ee for consumption by Ansible Automation Platform.
Details on how to setup and configure Ansible Automation Platform can be found in the documentation
Day 2 Operations of Maximo on AWS using Ansible Automation Platform
The use of Ansible Automation Platform and the MAS Execution Environment doesn’t stop at the install and configuration of MAS, but extends to running day 2 operations such as backup/restore which uses the existing roles provided in the s_devops ansible collection and installed libraries.
As the MAS Execution Environment is built from the official Red Hat supported execution environment it means the same container image will have access to all the supported collections from Red Hat. This allows for more sophisticated jobs and workflows to be setup in Ansible Automation Platform, so that jobs related to setup of your AWS resources (subnets, firewalls, etc) can be included alongside the jobs to configure MAS.
Conclusion
With Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) configured with the MAS Execution Environment you can now run your own playbooks to utilize the roles provided in the collection. Some examples of playbooks to install and configure MAS on ROSA can be found in the documentation The ability to control your company playbooks via source control and have them executed in Ansible Automation Platform allows for a more customized and powerful way to deploy and configure MAS.
Additional Resources
- MAS Collection documentation at http://ibm-mas.github.io/ansible-devops
- MAS Repository at http://github.com/ibm-mas/ansible-devops
- Ansible Automation Platform Execution environment image available at http://quay.io/repository/ibmmas/ansible-devops-ee
Next Steps
To learn more about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Service in AWS Marketplace, visit the page here. You can watch the demo video covering this core automation use case for AWS – deploying and retiring cloud resources.
Try the hands on self-paced Ansible Automation Platform in AWS labs. There’s 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 lab(s) on Ansible Automation Platform, you can visit here. You can also 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.