Automate with Ansible

Most server management infrastructure tasks have been automated for some time, but network changes can still create a bottleneck. Red Hat Ansible enables you to automate many IT tasks including cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, and intra-service orchestration. With Ansible you can configure systems, deploy software, and coordinate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) or zero downtime rolling updates.

Our Ansible Accelerator provides an overview of what Ansible can do to help modernize and streamline your DevOps and IT operations. The accelerator is available at three different intervention levels: a workshop, technical enablement, or full team consulting. In 6-12 weeks, we architect a proof of concept that delivers a more secure, compliant, reliable, and automated solution for you and your business.

What’s Included

• An Ansible pilot with demo playbooks for common use cases
• Ansible Engine core workshop
• Playbook authoring
• Security encryption
• Writing custom roles
• Tips for how to leverage cloud providers and dynamic inventories
• Using Ansible Engine as part of a CI/CD pipeline with other tools
• Ansible Tower accelerator
• Documentation including best practices and sample style guide to assist developers in adhering to corporate standards

Use Cases

• Enable automated deployment across devices in a hybrid model (cloud and on premises)
• Network automation in a hybrid model
• Automating Windows
• Application deployment for Windows/Linux
• Solving classic infrastructure-as-code challenges
• Support security scanning for code and infrastructure to enable compliance and remediation (DevSecOps)
• Support for automation of all cloud platforms including Azure and AWS

Ready to Accelerate?

Perficient + Red Hat

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

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Red Hat Summit is only a few weeks away! The conference will take place on May 23-25, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Still not registered? Click here!

Red Hat Summit is the premier open-source technology event, that brings together customers, partners, industry thought leaders, and community contributors to learn, network, and experience the full potential of open source.

Be sure to visit us at booth #116 where our Red Hat experts will answer your questions about Ansible, OpenShift, and showcase how Perficient can help you succeed with Red Hat. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, Perficient helps drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

Are you attending Red Hat Summit? Reach out to connect with our team.

IT organizations are responsible for an ever-increasing number of applications, infrastructure providers, operating system versions, network devices, platforms, monitoring, ticket systems, and more. The challenges that go along with managing it can range anywhere from time-consuming to downright Sisyphean. The rising adoption of cloud services adds a financial component, a new challenge for many organizations starting their cloud journey. It’s more important than ever for organizations to know as much as possible about their infrastructure, how it’s configured, and how it’s all integrated.

There are many enterprise organizations that have long-standing legacy technology which can’t be containerized or launched in the cloud. The idea that servers should be cattle and not pets is a fantastic goal, but sometimes that livestock gets a name and special treatment turning it into a big pet. There’s a constellation of IoT devices out there that might fall under one regulatory agency’s OT security guidelines or another. IT Engineers need to be able to keep their systems and applications flowing with changing business needs, security updates, and regulatory controls. If you’re looking for a solution to all these problems that’s where Ansible comes in.

Ansible

At its heart, Ansible is a configuration management and automation tool written in Python. That doesn’t mean Ansible developers need to know anything about the Python language to use it (although it is extensible with plugins and custom modules); instead, automation definitions are written in YAML. Sorry, there’s no escaping YAML in today’s IT landscape. Like it or not, it’s the language of configuration for now at least.

Teams using Ansible can define and execute desired states for devices, automate the installation of tools to support an application, and even deploy and configure the application itself using the same tool. Need to update a ServiceNow ticket after modifying a config file on a prod instance? Or add a Jira task if something that wasn’t accounted for pops up? Ansible has modules for that.

Think of a traditional IT application deployment on new infrastructure – let’s say a web server running a simple Flask app in the DMZ VLAN feeding off a PostgreSQL database on the internal VLAN. The Dev team has tested their code and hands it off to the operations team to deploy it on the prod servers with some step-by-step instructions as to what goes where, what required services need to be in place, required versions, and so on. Operations needs to prepare those servers in accordance with their own guidelines, install the Dev team’s prerequisites, then deploy the application. Meanwhile, network engineers need to ensure that the servers have valid IP addresses and that the firewalls on both sides of the DMZ are allowing the correct traffic though so that users can get to the app, and the web server can talk to the database.

What If?

What if instead of step-by-step instructions, it was a simple Ansible role that could be called from a playbook along with the network team’s IP and firewall roles and operations server-compliance configuration? Now everything needed to build that application is defined in code, packaged together, and tracked in source control. Ansible enables teams to do just that. When done carefully, Ansible playbooks and roles can be self-documenting. Ansible has a shallow learning curve, fantastic documentation, and a no-cost barrier to entry if using ansible-core to get started.

AAP Highlights

Ansible core can take a small team a long way. Larger teams and teams who might be outgrowing the command-line-only Ansible tools will want to look at Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform. Ansible Automation Platform (AAP for short) is a full suite of tools that expands on the capabilities of Ansible core. Some of the highlights of what AAP provides are:

• Role-based access control (RBAC) with multiple authentication sources (Active Directory, OAuth2, SAML, and more)
• SCM project integration supporting Git and Subversion
• Secure secrets management
• Job scheduling
• Job templates to execute playbooks
• Workflow Jobs can combine job templates from multiple projects and teams with pass/fail paths for workflow actions.
• Useful web UI for the Automation Controller and Private Automation Hub.
• Prebuilt inventory plugins for many third party CMDBs
• Full-featured REST API
• Access to the Red Hat supported content catalog full of partner resources by way of collections.
• A Private Automation Hub to host the execution environments, Red Hat Certified Automation Content as well as community and even custom collections to support an organization’s automation requirements.

Perficient + Red Hat

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

Contact Us

Red Hat AnsibleFest 2022 took place October 18-19 showcasing new updates to Red Hat’s automation software. The Ansible Automation Platform is an open-source IT automation tool that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other manual IT processes.

These capabilities, paired with current updates, improve Ansible’s offerings and give customers with what they need in order to modernize.

New Managed Ansible on AWS Offering

Red Hat introduced Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform’s availability in the AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings that makes it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy the software  on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Building on Red Hat’s goal to extend a common IT automation solution wherever organizations operate, this new offering enables customers to quickly automate and scale operations from their datacenter on AWS and out to the network’s edge.

New Managed Ansible on Azure Offering

Another noteworthy update is the implementation of Ansible on Azure at Azure Marketplace. This collaboration pairs hybrid cloud automation with the convenience and support of a managed application. Customers can experience Red Hat’s fully supported offering directly from the Azure Marketplace.

Event-driven Ansible

Automation allows us to give systems and technology speed and agility, while minimizing human error. However, when it comes to trouble tickets and issues, developers are often left to traditional and manual methods of troubleshooting and information gathering. One application of Event-riven Ansible is to remediate technology issues before near real-time, or at least trigger troubleshooting and information collection to find the root cause of an outage while support teams handle other issues. Event-driven Ansible has the potential to change the way IT teams respond to issues and illuminates many new automation possibilities.

IBM AI and Ansible

Red Hat and IBM Research collaborated on Project Wisdom, the first community project to create an intelligent, natural language processing capability for Ansible and the IT automation industry. Using an artificial intelligence (AI) model, the project aims to boost the productivity of IT automation developers and make IT automation more achievable and understandable for diverse IT professionals.

Perficient + Red Hat

Perficient’s middleware and application modernization expertise earned us the Red Hat 2020 Application Platform Success Partner of the Year and 2018 Rising Star Partner of the Year.

As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we offer a modern approach to delivering application modernization as well as cloud implementations and migrations.

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments.

Ansible Automation Platform is an open-source IT automation tool that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other manual IT processes. Unlike more simplistic management tools, Ansible users (like system administrators, developers, and architects) can use Ansible automation to install software, automate daily tasks, provision infrastructure, improve security and compliance, patch systems, and share automation across the entire organization. Ansible can bring operational efficiency by removing manual processes using automation.

Ansible provides an enterprise framework for building and operating IT automation at scale, from hybrid cloud to the edge. Ansible enables users across an organization to create, share, and manage automation—from development and operations to security and network teams.

IT managers can provide guidelines on how automation is applied to individual teams, and automation creators can write tasks that use existing knowledge. Ansible provides a more secure and stable foundation for deploying end-to-end automation.

Ansible can automate:

• Infrastructure
• Applications
• Networks
• Containers
• Security
• Cloud

See what’s new with Ansible Automation Platform 2.2!

A collection of nodes or machines operating jointly is known as an OpenShift Cluster. A Master and a Worker node are the two types of servers that make up Kubernetes’ top level. These servers may be physical servers or virtual machines (VMs) (Bare metal). These servers work together to form an OpenShift cluster, which is managed by the Control Plane services.

In this article, we discussed how to build up a multi-node Openshift (OCP) cluster using user-provisioned infrastructure on AWS.

OpenShift Cluster can be Installed in 3 Different Ways:

1. Community Edition, often known as OKD (Origin Kubernetes Distribution)

The open-source upstream community edition of Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform is referred to as an OKD. Based on Docker and Kubernetes, OKD is a platform for managing and orchestrating containers.

2. Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA)

Red Hat and Amazon Web Services jointly administer and provide support for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), a fully-managed OpenShift service (AWS). You are free to concentrate on deploying apps because your clusters are being maintained by this service.

3. Enterprise Edition, aka Openshift Container Platform (OCP)

What is OCP in OpenShift?

A reliable hybrid cloud foundation for developing and growing containerized applications is known as Enterprise Edition, also known as Openshift Container Platform (OCP). Profit from faster platform upgrades and installation from a leader in enterprise Kubernetes.

What is User Provisioned Infrastructure (UPI)?

Since Red Hat OpenShift 4 was released, the term “User Provisioned Infrastructure” (UPI) has been used to describe environments where users deploy the infrastructure (compute, network, and storage resources) that houses the OpenShift Container Platform. In this kind of installation, the installer will install the Openshift Cluster and resources linked to Openshift while you, the user, deploy underlying infrastructures like the operating system.

This article will discuss a subject in Openshift called How to Install and Configure Multi-Node Openshift (OCP) Cluster Using Run It Yourself User Provisioned Infrastructure. You must complete a collection of 30+ Hands-on Labs from us in order to understand Openshift and pass the EX180 & EX280 examinations.

This blog will discuss:

• CONFIGURE AND INSTALL AWS CLI ON LINUX (EC2)
• Create an Openshift cluster using user-provided hardware
• Cluster installation during open shift
• Accessing the Cluster
• Examine Cluster Logs
• Eliminate the Openshift Cluster.

Conditions For Cluster Configuration:

An alternative to the difficult and painful process of deploying Openshift clusters is to use a cloud platform. Any cloud platform can be used; in this case, we’re utilizing AWS Cloud. Make sure you have the following configuration available before you start constructing a cluster:

1. We will follow the guide here to Install & Configure Multi-Node Openshift Cluster using Run It Yourself User Provisioned Infrastructure On AWS.
2. Create a free AWS account because we’ll build up an Openshift Cluster on the AWS Cloud.
3. Create and update a Redhat account, join Redhat Developer, and access the Active subscription. We require you to go to the subscription page, where you should see one Active Subscription.
4. Using the free domain name registration service offered by Freenom.com. For connecting with Amazon Route53, we will use this domain name for a number of labs throughout the entire course.
5. Sign up for nameserver entries to configure Amazon Route53. Visit our article on Introduction to AWS Route 53 to learn how to configure Route53.
6. Using EC2, starting a Linux instance.

The AWS EC2 instance used for this setup has the following configurations.

• AMI: select 64-bit (x86) architecture.
• Instance type: t2.micro

7. Utilize Putty to connect to an EC2 instance.

Configure and Install AWS CLI on Linux (EC2)

The AWS CLI is one of the available AWS tools (Command-line interface). Through commands, it is used to manage AWS services. An integrated configuration for managing AWS public cloud services is called the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). Using a single tool, we can automate the download, configuration, and monitoring of numerous AWS services using scripts.

Create an Openshift Cluster Using User-provided Hardware

1. Making A Key Pair For SSH Access On A Cluster Node:

Create key pair:

$ sudo -i

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -N ” -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa

View the public SSH key:

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

2. The Installation Program’s Obtaining:

Visit the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager website and click on the Infrastructure Provider page. Use your login information to access your Red Hat account. If you don’t have one, do so now. To create an account, refer to the Redhat subscription portion in the Pre-requisite section.

Open Infrastructure Provider by clicking this link: https://console.redhat.com/openshift/install

Log in to your cluster, scroll down to “Run it yourself,” then select “AWS.”

Unzip the installation software.

$ tar xvf openshift-install-linux.tar.gz

$ ls

3. Installing Linux with OpenShift CLI:

Save the file after downloading the OpenShift v4.8 Linux Client entry.

$ cd /root/openshift

$ wget https://mirror.openshift.com/pub/openshift-v4/clients/ocp/stable/openshift-client-linux.tar.gz

Check the installed client binary.

$ oc

Cluster Installation During Open Shift

Start the installation of the Openshift Cluster.

$ ./openshift-install create cluster –dir=/root/openshift –log-level=info

(This Cluster creation process will take 30-45 minutes)

Accessing the Cluster

1. Using the command line (CLI), log on to the cluster:

Export the root user’s kubeadmin credentials.

$ export KUBECONFIG=<installation_directory>/auth/kubeconfig

$ echo ‘export KUBECONFIG=/root/openshift/auth/kubeconfig’ >> $HOME/.bashrc

To confirm you can properly execute oc commands using the exported configuration:

$ oc get nodes

Check that you can successfully execute kubectl commands using the exported configuration:

$ kubectl get nodes

2. Using the Web Console (GUI) to log into the cluster:

List the web console route for the OpenShift Container Platform:

$ oc get routes -n openshift-console | grep console

Copy the Portal URL from the installation command’s output.

Log in using the output’s username and password:

Examine Cluster Logs

The OpenShift Container Platform installation log contains a summary of each installation. The log contains the necessary information to access the cluster if an installation is successful.

Examine the log file named.openshift install.log located in the installation directory on the installation host:

$ cat <install_dir>/.openshift_install.log

$ cat /root/openshift/.openshift_install.log

Eliminate the Openshift Cluster

Please use the following commands to remove the cluster:

$ sudo su –

$ cd /root/openshift

$ ./openshift-install destroy cluster –dir=/root/openshift –log-level=info

Conclusion

On OpenShift, there are numerous ways to deploy an application. In this post, I explained and demonstrated some of the simplest techniques for deploying an application on OpenShift OCP. You can deploy apps using container images if you already have all the necessary tools for building and storing images. Consequently, OpenShift is a fantastic solution for cloud-based container-based applications. It makes it very simple to develop, test, deploy, and maintain apps.

Using Ansible Tower I have the power to automate simple and complex tasks like configuring and installing packages on Linux serves and configuring AWS infrastructure.

Your company should think about implementing Ansible to meet your business needs if you are looking for: multi-user access, user management, credentials, security, RBAC, complex orchestration, reporting, logging, and/or auditing. The Ansible Playbook is CLI-only and Ansible Tower provides a Web GUI and API server for working with Ansible in an enterprise environment.

Ansible Tower main features

• Visual dashboard
• Graphical inventory management
• RBAC
• Job scheduling
• Job history report
• Remote command execution
• Centralized logging
• Notification
• Multi-playbook workflow
• Restful API

Benefits of Ansible Tower

• Reuse of ansible scripts across the organization
• Provides shared infrastructure for team to run ansible scripts
• Easily manage privileged and protected administrator credentials
• Ease of use for IT teams that traditionally use GUI tools
• Ansible Tower provides framework for running and managing Ansible Automation Platform efficiently on an enterprise scale
• Offers web interface, RBAC, centralized logging and auditing
• RESTful API facilitates integration with enterprise’s existing workflows and tool sets

Ansible Tower Architecture

Installation of Ansible Tower

I choose the t2.medium instance because Ansible Tower requires at least 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM.

The base image was set to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, You will also have to allow HTTP and HTTPS traffic from the outside to the EC2 instance.

Use Below Commands

> yum update -y
> yum install wget -y
> sudo wget https://releases.ansible.com/ansible-tower/setup/ansible-tower-setup-latest.tar.gz
> sudo tar xvf ansible-tower-setup-latest.tar.gz
> cd ansible-tower-setup-3.8.6-2/

Set the initial administrator password and database password to run the installer

> sudo vi inventory

Set an administrator password and database password,\

> vi roles/preflight/defaults/main.yml

Make Sone changes in main.yml file

When done, start installation of Ansible Tower

sudo ./setup.sh

You can configure Ansible Tower using the following:

• CLI
• RESTful API
• Web UI

We will use the Web UI since this is the most preferred method by most new Ansible Tower users. Open your browser point to your Ansible Tower server IP or hostname via https protocol.

Agree to the End User License Agreement and submit to finish the installation.

Create Infrastructure on AWS

We will create a single EC2 instance on AWS. Then configure Ansible Tower to run the playbook.

1. Create a dedicated virtual environment containing libraries for talking to AWS
2. Import our playbook to Ansible Tower
3. Create custom credential type and instantiated it
4. Define our inventory
5. Add a job template and execute it

Sample Ansible Playbook

—
– hosts: all
gather_facts: false
tasks:
– name: Create a VM
steampunk.aws.ec2_instance:
name: “{{ i_name }}”
type: “{{ i_type }}”
ami: ami-0e8286b71b81c3cc1
key_pair: demo_key
subnet: “{{ i_subnet }}”

Creating a Virtual Environment

You cannot create a new virtual environment through the web interface. Instead, you need to SSH into Ansible Tower and run commands from the terminal.

$ sudo yum install gcc python3-devel
$ sudo mkdir /opt/venvs
$ sudo python3 -m venv /opt/venvs/steampunk_aws
$ sudo /opt/venvs/steampunk_aws/bin/pip install psutil ansible boto3

You need to open the Ansible Tower web UI, log in and go to the Settings-> System page. Add the / opt / venvs path to the Custom Virtual Environment Path field, save your settings, and you’re done.

Add a Sample Project

Before running an Ansible playbook on the Ansible Tower, it must be retrieved from an external source (Ansible Tower does not have playbook creation capabilities). If you go to the project page and click the green plus button, you’ll see something like this:

• My YAML file store in gitrepo, here I am using SCM type Git.
• For this project, I have already created the demo repository.
• Repository Link:-  https://github.com/suraj11198/Ansible-Tower.git

Supplying credentials

Providing credentials for Ansible playbooks is probably the most complex step in the whole process.

Creating a custom credential type

You can add custom credential types by navigating to the Credential Types page and clicking the green plus button. Entering the name and description values ​​shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but the input and injector configuration fields are awkward.

In this case, the content of the input configuration field is the following YAML document:

fields:
– id: aws_access_key
label: AWS Access key
type: string
– id: aws_secret_key
label: AWS Secret Key
type: string
secret: true
– id: aws_region
label: AWS region
type: string
choices: [ eu-central-1, eu-north-1 ]
required:
– aws_access_key
– aws_secret_key
– aws_region

This YAML document tells Ansible Tower that the credential type has three required fields and that the aws_secret_key contains sensitive information to be encrypted and stored.

Injector configuration describes how Ansible Tower passes credentials to Ansible playbooks. This example uses environment variables.

env:
AWS_ACCESS_KEY: “{{ aws_access_key }}”
AWS_SECRET_KEY: “{{ aws_secret_key }}”
AWS_REGION: “{{ aws_region }}”

Then just click the save button at the end and you’re done.

Adding AWS Credentials

Now that you’ve defined your custom credential type, you can add your AWS credentials to Ansible Tower. Go to the Credentials page and click the green plus button and the Ansible Tower will display the following form:

Note that you must select the permission type before you can view the type details field. Click the Save button and you are ready for the next configuration step.

Define an inventory

Running each Ansible playbook runs a task on one or more hosts. The playbook only connects to the remote Web API, so all you need is localhost. You can create it by navigating to the inventory page, clicking the green plus button, and selecting inventory from the drop-down menu.

Once you have named your inventory, you must click the Save button before navigating to the Hosts tab. After clicking the green plus button again, you need to enter the host details as follows:

Copy the following variable definition into the variable input field:

ansible_connection: local

ansible_python_interpreter: “{{ansible_playbook_python}}”

If you do not set these variables correctly, Ansible will not be able to find the packages   installed in your virtual environment.

Add Job Template

Ansible Tower job templates are basically template based Ansible playbook executions. Job templates define the playbook that runs Ansible Tower, the credentials and variables that can be used during the run, output redundancy, and more. In this case, the job template should look like this:

This dialog collects all  the information  defined earlier.

• Select the appropriate inventory source.
• Select the appropriate project and playbook from now on.
• Paste the AWS credentials.

These fields are highlighted in the screenshot above. But still something is missing: the value of the Ansible playbook variable.

Running the job

Once you have entered all the required data and confirmed your selection, Ansible Tower will run the playbook and display the output.

Now See, Our EC2 Instance is created.

We have just created a simple EC2 server with Ansible Tower. hope this will help you use Ansible Tower in future projects. If you have any questions about how Ansible creates an AWS instance, please post in the comments section.

How Can Perficient Help You?

Perficient is a certified Amazon Web Services partner with more than 10 years of experience delivering enterprise-level applications and expertise in cloud platform solutions, contact center, application modernization, migrations, data analytics, mobile, developer and management tools, IoT, serverless, security, and more. Paired with our industry-leading strategy and team, Perficient is equipped to help enterprises tackle the toughest challenges and get the most out of their implementations and integrations.

Learn more about our AWS practice and get in touch with our team here!

Meeting the ever-increasing IT demands of the healthcare industry is critical for organizations to keep up and stand out from their competitors. According to Forrester,

“The stakes are as high as ever in healthcare, as the decisions made through the end of the decade will determine an organization’s success for the next 50 years. Being informed and getting in front of the industry shifts provides a much-needed injection to fuel success for HCOs in the future.”

Staying up to date on IT and making the right decisions about digital strategy lays the foundation for healthcare firms that want to reach their goal of a healthier population. Many organizations are choosing Perficient and Red Hat to help further their modernization efforts and break away from the constraints of legacy technologies to take advantage of innovative care and wellness solutions.

Modernizing legacy platforms and applications enables healthcare organizations to embrace the cloud and improve healthcare experiences, unify disconnected systems, and find cost savings/efficiencies. Let’s take a look at a few of the ways Perficient and Red Hat can help healthcare organizations from wherever they are along their modernization journey.

Modernize IT to Improve Outcomes

Modern healthcare organizations are using data to improve patient and clinical experiences. Getting real-time insights and capabilities at the point of care requires a flexible IT infrastructure. That usually consists of cloud (hybrid or multi-cloud) and a trusted application platform.

OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise-ready Kubernetes platform, provides the operational consistency and interoperability needed to advance healthcare IT innovation.

Patient Data and HIPAA Compliance

Collecting and interpreting patient data is critical for healthcare organizations. They must also protect that data and comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and other standards.

With Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat OpenShift, healthcare organizations can automate security checks, find vulnerabilities, and immediately remediate issues at scale while remaining in compliance with HIPAA and other government mandates.

Intelligent Data-as-a-Service for Modern Data Management

To improve the quality of patient care, healthcare organizations, as well as patients, need access to the right data, at the right time, and in the right context.

You need to eliminate data silos and disparate systems with an architecture that can process data from many sources and intelligently route information to a variety of destinations. Red Hat’s intelligent Data-as-a-Service (iDaaS) solution helps make healthcare data available where it’s needed―in real-time.

Perficient + Red Hat

Perficient’s healthcare expertise has earned us consistent recognition by Modern Healthcare as one of the largest healthcare management firms. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

Want to learn more? Check out our content hub.

2021 was a big year for the cloud industry. Due in part to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, organizations have found value in moving to the cloud for things such as transitioning to remote work because some model of hybrid work is here to stay for many workers.

Most of the major cloud providers all boasted significant revenue growth in 2021 and 2022 is poised to be another huge year for the cloud industry.

Here are some key trends to look out for this year:

1. Containers and Cloud-Native Technology Will Continue to Grow

The continued growth of containers will be a big trend to watch out for in 2022. In 2021, 42% of developers said that their organizations used containers, and according to Forrester Research that will grow to over half of all organizations in 2022.

Containers provide a portable and agile way to deploy and manage virtual computing applications in the cloud. With a container, an application runs quickly and reliably from one computing environment to another.

Kubernetes is the primary method for users and cloud providers to enable containers by automating many of the manual processes involved in deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. Kubernetes can run on platforms like Red Hat OpenShift or Enterprise Linux.

2. Cloud-native Security

Cloud-native security is another area that will see significant growth in tandem with the growth of containers and cloud-native technology.

For example, StackRox, recently acquired by Red Hat, is poised for growth as a Kubernetes-native security platform for cloud-native applications, containers, and Kubernetes. StackRox provides security across the container life cycle. Their container security platform reduces the attack surface, ensures compliance, and stops attacks.

3. Hybrid is Here for Good

Hybrid is here to stay. Whether it be hybrid work, hybrid cars, or hybrid cloud; hybrid is the future. Combining the strengths of different approaches has always been how the most innovative companies continue their success.

Hybrid cloud enables the integration of both on-prem and public cloud computing resources. There are many advantages to having a hybrid approach to cloud data and analytics such as:

• Better support for remote and hybrid workers
• Increased agility and innovation
• Improved scalability and control
• Better security and risk management

Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solution allows organizations to build applications quickly, manage workloads efficiently, and deploy/automate anywhere.

4. ESG Sustainability Efforts Will Grow

In cloud and in society as a whole, there is a growing movement for environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG). Climate change is obviously a growing problem, so the major public cloud providers have increasingly been pushing their own sustainability efforts and providing new visibility to users. This includes things like carbon footprint dashboards which show organizations how their cloud usage is impacting the environment.

Monitoring energy usage is environmentally and fiscally responsible, as lower energy usage benefits the planet and keeps costs down for organizations.

In 2022, expect there to be even more sustainability efforts from the major cloud providers.

5. “The Great Resignation” Will Drive Further Cloud Adoption

The “Great Resignation” is a new term we’ve heard a lot recently to describe the trend of workers resigning from their jobs. So, what’s driving this mass exodus of people from their jobs?

Baby boomers taking early retirement, parents staying home for their kids because of limited options for childcare, and fears of contracting Covid-19 are some of the many factors that have led to this phenomenon.

IT teams are no exception in experiencing workforce shortages and will continue to experience a loss of talented workers that understand their legacy platforms in 2022. Many organizations will turn to cloud platforms and automated solutions to make up for labor shortages they experience as these tools require less manpower to manage.

Why Perficient and Cloud?

Cloud has evolved to become so much more than a place to collaborate on documents or somewhere to store personal information. Today, cloud is a collection of tools that both improve business processes and enable a larger digital transformation.

Together, we’re unlocking the potential cloud brings to your business. Our work with some of the world’s biggest technology innovators means we can bring the right technology solution to your cloud strategy.

Perficient + Red Hat

Red Hat is the leading provider of enterprise open-source software solutions delivering reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, container, and Kubernetes technologies. As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

We offer targeted platform as a service (PaaS) solutions for the enterprise using Red Hat OpenShift, which are founded on our best practices, methodology, and reusable frameworks to accelerate, migrate, and automate processes.

Recently, Perficient and Red Hat presented a great discussion surrounding middleware and the importance of modernization. The discussion was led by Perficient’s Red Hat Practice Director Charles Mahoney, and three experts from Red Hat: Chief Architect and Strategist, E.G. Nadhan; Director of Business Development and Hybrid Cloud, Jason Milliron; and Senior Manager of Application Development Solution Architects, Ron Murhammer.

Key Takeaways

What is modernization?

A well-kept secret about modernization is that it is about transitioning from legacy applications to a more resilient and proactive system. It is also not a one-and-done solution, it is a journey and requires a holistic approach to make sure the whole IT enterprise is modernized. With technology always evolving, modernization is never complete. There will always be new things to address. Ultimately, what modernization comes down to is three things: 1) decreasing costs, 2) growing revenue, and 3) increasing agility.

A good analogy is when you are remodeling your house, it’s not just about painting the walls and changing the countertops. It’s really about starting with the foundation and ensuring that everything is at the standard that it should be today. Similarly, modernization is not just moving everything to the cloud. The cloud is certainly a part of modernization, but without modernizing everything else, you are just moving your problems to the cloud.

What is middleware?

Middleware is software that allows companies to do things such as run applications, integrate applications with other systems, and automate human workflows. It is basically the plumbing behind everything that makes your software run, allowing developers to focus on developing instead of worrying about transactions or their applications going down. Another way to think about middleware is as the connective tissue for data, applications, and processes. When you put middleware into the context of the fundamental nature of computers and data processing, it is middleware’s job to make sure data is delivered to the right place at the right time.

Middleware is oftentimes forgotten because it is the framework to help solve the underlying functionalities that you need to create applications and services. When you have good middleware, you tend not to think about it because it allows developers to focus on their jobs.

What are some legacy middleware challenges?

Legacy middleware that was designed 10-20 years ago presents many challenges when it comes to moving to the cloud and being more agile. These platforms were built on-prem, and were not designed to quickly scale up and down with business needs. Data has become more important in recent years with the amount of data that is being processed now. There has also been a push to be more API-focused and driven. In addition to that, the cloud has developed a stronger focus. These changes make legacy middleware expensive to maintain, and oftentimes expensive to migrate to or integrate with cloud technologies.

How should companies modernize?

Companies should first determine their integration strategy, options, and overall architecture, then make sure their integration mechanisms are built to work in the future as their business changes. They also need to take a hard look at what technologies and middleware their applications and services are built on, specifically the landscape of the applications that are core to their business and focus on the middleware technologies those are built on to make sure they aren’t holding their business back.

Catch the discussion here, or watch it below to learn more about middleware and the importance of modernization.

Why Perficient and Red Hat

Perficient’s middleware and application modernization expertise earned us the Red Hat 2020 Application Platform Success Partner of the Year and 2018 Rising Star Partner of the Year.

As a Red Hat Premier Partner and a Red Hat Apex Partner, we offer a modern approach to deliver application modernization as well as cloud implementations and migrations.

Red Hat provides open-source technologies that enable strategic cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration solutions to make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments.

As one of nine launch partners for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA), Perficient developed a Kubernetes-based accelerator to take clients’ applications to production on OpenShift in just a few hours. In a recent webinar, our technology expert demonstrated the ins and outs of the accelerator and showed attendees:

• How to launch a ROSA cluster
• A GitOps overview
• How to migrate existing applications to OpenShift
• Day 2 operations, including logging, monitoring, and metrics

ROSA is a fully managed and jointly supported offering that combines the power of OpenShift and the AWS public cloud. It provides production-ready Kubernetes that simplifies shifting workloads to AWS public cloud.

Speaker:

Matthieu Rethers Senior Solutions Architect, Perficient

This is the fifth and final installment in our middleware modernization series. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here, and the fourth installment here.

Now that you’ve learned all about middleware and the most common use cases, it’s time to choose a technology partner and software to help you modernize your middleware.

Red Hat Middleware helps you improve the features, reliability, and security of your middleware platform. Its comprehensive frameworks, integration solutions, process automation, runtimes, and programming languages help create a unified environment for application modernization.

The Red Hat Application Services portfolio of middleware products provides your teams with the ability to develop, implement, and run business applications cost-effectively and at scale. All products in the portfolio can run on-site, in the cloud, or within a container platform like Red Hat OpenShift.

Overview of Red Hat Middleware

• Red Hat Runtimes: Accelerate application development and delivery with a set of products, tools, and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications.
• Red Hat Integration: Streamline integration development with a comprehensive set of integration and messaging technologies to connect applications and data across hybrid infrastructures.
• Red Hat Process Automation: Adapt quickly to changing business needs with solutions for intelligently automating business decisions and processes across heterogeneous environments.

Features and Benefits of Red Hat Middleware

Productivity

Red Hat Application Services enables higher productivity and faster time-to-market, allowing your teams to spend more time innovating and focusing on business-critical tasks. New applications can be developed and deployed quickly using tooling with application frameworks and pre-built templates.

Pre-integrated capabilities, including connectors, data caching, messaging, API management, rules management, and process automation, help provide a more consistent development experience.

Reliability

Like most of Red Hat’s product portfolio, Red Hat Application Services are open source and tested by community users and Red Hat engineers. This coherent, integrated set of products and services provide consistent application development and a streamlined delivery environment for hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.

Flexibility

Red Hat Application Services enables developers to connect processes or data from on-premises to SaaS with standard connectors and across hybrid cloud environments. Developers have access to established languages, frameworks, architectures, and open-source practices for new development and existing applications.

Hybrid and Multi-cloud

Red Hat Application Services allows developers to develop and deliver cloud-portable applications independently from the cloud provider’s processes and procedures. The applications are cloud-agnostic and can be developed on-site and on-cloud using the same set of capabilities.

Red Hat Application Services helps you:

• Manage and process messaging and streaming in a single and consistent way across clouds
• Integrate consistently to a specific cloud provider’s services across clouds
• Automate business processes across clouds
• Make data accessible in a single and consistent way across clouds
• Build applications with failover capabilities across cloud providers in a single and consistent way
• Experience flexible scaling during high-traffic periods and migrate your applications to the cloud using the same consistent set of tools that you use on-premises

Download our guide to learn more about middleware and start your modernization journey today.

Why Perficient

Our middleware and application modernization expertise earned us the 2020 Red Hat Application Platform Success Partner of the Year Award. As a Red Hat Premier and Apex Partner, we help drive strategic initiatives around cloud-native development, DevOps, and enterprise integration to ensure successful application modernization and cloud implementations and migrations.

We offer targeted platform as a service (PaaS) solutions for the enterprise using Red Hat OpenShift, which are founded on our best practices, methodology, and reusable frameworks to accelerate, migrate, and automate processes.

Red Hat OpenShift pushes the boundaries of what containers and Kubernetes can do for developers, driving innovation for stateful applications, serverless or event-driven applications, and machine learning. The platform integrates tightly with Jenkins and other standard continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools for security-focused application builds. Red Hat OpenShift helps you build with speed, agility, confidence, and choice so that developers can get back to doing work that matters.