Itential Automation Gateway (Preview)

Itential Automation Gateway (IAG) enables you to securely organize, share, and run your growing library of automations, and provides enterprise-grade features for managing access control and exposing your automations for others to run.

IAG seamlessly connects your Python scripts, Ansible playbooks, and OpenTofu plans with your Itential Platform, enabling you to to orchestrate complex processes across various devices, systems, and tools while providing robust security and scalability.

Key features

• Local execution: Scripts and playbooks run locally on the gateway server to maintain data sovereignty and minimize latency.
• Security: Supports role-based access control (RBAC) and group-based access control (GBAC), credential vaulting, and audit logging.
• Scalability: IAG can be deployed in a cluster configuration for high availability and performance.
• Script Cataloging: Centralized management of reusable automation assets.

How it works

Moving from a single-user automation model to a team-oriented approach typically creates extra work for engineers. IAG removes these barriers by providing short-lived automation environments and a structured process for creating user-accessible services.

IAG services pull code from a Git repository, run the code in a virtual environment, and package it as a service that users can run without specialized knowledge of the underlying tools. IAG transforms automation tools into immutable services with standardized inputs, allowing operators and external teams to easily view and run them.

IAG supports the following tools:

• Ansible
• Python
• OpenTofu

For more information about gateway cluster architecture, see Architecture & Deployment Models.

Managed run-time environments

IAG creates well-defined, transitory run-time environments that ensure your automations run correctly every time, regardless of deployment location. Each automation has its own environment with consistency across all deployments.

Service based structure

By transforming automations into a service model, IAG allows other teams to access and use these automations in a well-defined, structured manner. This lets you continue developing automations while providing team-oriented access. Teams can use the automations without needing to understand the underlying requirements to execute Python, Ansible, or OpenTofu instructions.

Scalable automation

You can run IAG as a single user to cleanly manage automations or deploy it in a client-server model where each server can easily replicate services and scale out. As a single binary, IAG doesn't dictate infrastructure requirements or server size.

Orchestration

IAG uses Gateway Manager to establish secure connections between your IAG clusters and the Itential Platform. Gateway Manager discovers all of the gateway services associated with your gateway cluster and advertise these services to Itential Platform, enabling the Platform to orchestrate these services as tasks in automation workflows. Your IAG deployment executes the services when Itential Platform calls them during a workflow.