It’s been hard keeping this quiet for the past few months, but the day is finally here — I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Itential’s Automation Service.
As you’ll recall, we recently launched our free automation gateway tool torero — a dynamic automation execution platform that allows engineers to build services around Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and OpenTofu Plans so team members without development skillsets can run those automations quickly and securely. Let me make this clear: torero isn’t going anywhere, and it’s going to continue to be free. On top of that core technology, though, we’ve built a set of enterprise-grade cloud-services that we’re excited to share with everyone today.
The new automation service will bridge the gaps between producing automation and consuming automation. It’s designed so automation developers can leverage all the functionality of an automation gateway to operationalize their automations, and automation consumers can self-serve productized services even with no development expertise.
The new service is a powerful set of capabilities designed to enable NetDevOps teams to increase automation footprint and drive greater efficiency for the larger organization — while being streamlined, cost-effective and easy to adopt.
Why We Built Our New Automation Service
Today, NetDevOps teams are either losing time managing and maintaining virtual environments (or even more sophisticated DIY operational stacks) to allow others to run your automations, or you’re losing time hand-executing their own scripts in response to tickets.
And operationalizing automation doesn’t get easier as teams advance their automation efforts — script sprawl has emerged as a significant challenge for teams with a growing library of network automations. There are more network engineers using tools like Python and Ansible than ever before — but managing and operationalizing an extensive library of automations across an organization is vastly different from sharing a few scripts with other developers. This is due to challenges like the time and effort that must be spent operationalizing automations, a lack of standardization across the network, the difficulty associated with building resilient, scalable infrastructure, and the complexities of managing access control across a distributed, hybrid network.
The new service is designed so teams can skip over all of that. We’re providing a streamlined experience and scalable framework that ensures you have the freedom you need to build automations, and consumers have the access and ease they need to run them.
The Freedom NetDevOps Engineers Need to Build Automations
Itential Cloud’s new powerful Automation Service is designed to streamline how you onboard, define, and execute automations. The heart of our new automation service offering is an all-new reimagined Itential Automation Gateway (IAG), which offers dynamic execution environments for Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and OpenTofu Plans. With IAG, automation developers can build automations using whatever tool suits the job and store them in a Git repository, then pull those automations down from the repo to create services around them for others to consume. A virtual environment is generated at runtime when a consumer goes to run that automation, and any changes to the script itself are immediately reflected in the service offering through Git. NetDevOps teams who adopt our automation service will see themselves evolve from consumers of automation to producers of value-creating services.
Key Capabilities:
- Any framework, any script, one platform.
- Real-time git pull.
- Dynamic execution environments.
- Service-based automation.
- Flexible service definition.
The Access Operators Need to Consume & Execute Automations
On the consumer side, any automation published as a service can be delivered through a visual catalog in Itential Cloud. Robust authorization and role-based access control allow for secure delivery across the organization. This way, network operators, security personnel, other network automation engineers, and anyone else who should have access can go into the product catalog in Itential Cloud and run a published network automation as a service. Think about using AWS or another public cloud provider — it’s the same model fully realized for the complexities of your hybrid network.
Key Capabilities:
- Role-based access control.
- Api-driven integration.
- Service based structure.
- Self-service access.
By bridging the gap between automation producers and consumers and providing a scalable framework for sharing and execution, we’re aiming to turn internal network service requests into a smooth, cloud-like experience for everyone from network operators to application developers. It’s about streamlining the experience for everyone involved so personnel can focus on their own skills areas while easily contributing to a wider, more scalable system.
Getting Started with Itential Automation Service
We’re making it as easy and accessible as possible for teams to get their hands on the new service to understand how it helps scale automation. You can access an unlimited free 30-day trial which includes:
- Unlimited minutes.
- Unlimited gateway nodes.
- Unlimited cloud account users.
- Rest API.
- Full support.
After your trial, with consumption-based pricing, the service makes it easy for organizations to get started quickly and scale seamlessly as needs grow.
We’re looking forward to what NetDevOps teams will be able to do with our new automation service! You can get pricing details here.
And of course, if you’re not ready for a commercial platform, our free tool torero is helping network automation engineers securely share their scripts every day.
Want to learn more? We’re going live at 2:30 PM PT / 5:30 PM ET today to showcase how our new automation service works. Tune in here!
Peter Sprygada
Vice President, Product Management ‐ Itential
Peter Sprygada serves as the Vice President, Product Management at Itential after serving as the Chief Technology Officer at Pureport where he was responsible for their multi-cloud network as a service interconnect platform. Prior to Pureport, Sprygada was a Distinguished Engineer for Red Hat, where he played the role of Chief Architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Sprygada also held senior technical and leadership positions at Arista and Cisco, as well as several networking startups.
