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Ascender

Ascender

Ascender Automation Platform Overview

Ascender is an enterprise automation platform built on the Ansible ecosystem. It provides a centralized web interface, REST API, and role-based access control for managing Ansible automation across teams and environments. Ascender handles credential management, job scheduling, inventory tracking, and audit logging, giving organizations a consistent way to run and monitor automation at scale.

Key Capabilities

  • Centralized Automation Management: Web UI and REST API for launching, scheduling, and monitoring Ansible playbooks and workflows across your infrastructure.
  • Role-Based Access Control: Define organizations, teams, and users with granular permissions over projects, inventories, credentials, and job templates.
  • Credential Management: Securely store and inject credentials (SSH keys, cloud provider tokens, vault passwords) into automation runs without exposing them to playbook authors.
  • Inventory Management: Maintain static inventories or sync dynamic inventories from cloud providers, CMDBs, and other external sources.
  • Job Scheduling and Workflows: Schedule recurring automation, chain playbooks into multi-step workflows, and set up approval gates.
  • Automation Mesh: Distribute execution across multiple nodes and networks using Ascender Automation Mesh, enabling automation in segmented or air-gapped environments.
  • Audit and Compliance: Full logging of every automation run, including who launched it, what changed, and the complete output, providing an audit trail for compliance requirements.
  • Ascender Pro Integration: Optionally deploy Ascender Pro alongside Ascender for analytics, reporting, and log aggregation. See the Ascender Pro section below.

Architecture

Ascender runs on Kubernetes and is managed by a Kubernetes operator. Supported platforms include K3s, Amazon EKS, Google GKE, Azure AKS, RKE2, DKP, and OpenShift. A typical deployment includes:

  • Ascender Web and API: The web interface and REST API for managing automation
  • Ascender Task: Background workers that execute Ansible playbooks
  • PostgreSQL: Database for all Ascender state (deployable as a built-in container or an external instance)
  • Ascender Operator: Kubernetes operator that manages the lifecycle of Ascender components
  • Automation Mesh (optional): Execution nodes for distributing automation into segmented or remote networks

The Operator manages the lifecycle of the other components, deploying, upgrading, and configuring them based on a single Kubernetes custom resource. The Web and API layer communicates with the Task workers over an internal message bus, and both layers read from and write to PostgreSQL.

Usage Examples

Here are some common use cases for Ascender:

  • Standardizing configuration management and patching across large server fleets
  • Orchestrating multi-tier application deployments with approval workflows
  • Managing cloud infrastructure provisioning across AWS, Azure, and GCP
  • Enforcing security baselines and compliance policies through scheduled automation
  • Providing self-service automation to development teams with controlled access

Ascender Pro

Ascender Pro is an optional add-on that provides analytics, reporting, and log aggregation for Ascender. It captures job events, change data, and fact information in real time and surfaces them through a dedicated web interface.

Ascender Pro is installed using the same ascender-install tool. See the Ascender Pro Installation Guide to get started, or contact us if you're interested in getting access.

Contact Information

For sales and new customer inquiries, visit ciq.com.

Existing customers can open a support ticket at portal.ciq.com.

Overview