CIQ Ascender Pro Gives Enterprise Linux Automation the Power to Proactively Fix the Underlying Infrastructure

Ascender Reaqt watches a fleet of inventory and fixes problems the moment they happen, Ascender Registry gives teams control over collections, containers and cross-environment automation, Federated Inventories speeds up routing of jobs to the right inventory, and a newly open sourced Galaxy Proxy brings that same caching speed to the wider Ansible community.

RENO, Nev., July 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- CIQ, the founding commercial sponsor of Rocky Linux and the company behind the Ascender Pro automation platform, today announced that Ascender Pro now closes the loop between detection and remediation across an entire Enterprise Linux fleet, automatically routing the right fix to the right host in the right environment. Operations teams get one system that watches for problems, decides what to do about them, and acts without a person in the middle, no matter how many environments they run. That same investment extends to the collections and containers teams depend on, and reaches beyond Ascender Pro entirely, with CIQ open sourcing the caching layer behind it for the wider Ansible community. Ascender Reaqt, Ascender Registry and Federated Inventories are available now for Ascender Pro customers, with Ascender Galaxy Proxy released today as open source.

Most operations teams generate far more signal than they can act on by hand: a disk filling up, a service that won't restart, a configuration drift no one caught. Closing the gap between that signal and a fix has traditionally meant a person in the loop, watching dashboards, triaging alerts and logging in to fix each incident one at a time, environment by environment.

Ascender Reaqt closes that gap. Each rule set gets its own endpoint and its own authentication token, so a credential tied to one integration never exposes any other, and a companion web application gives administrators a full UI and API for managing users, teams, permissions, providers, rule sets and listeners, backed by dashboards and metrics. Built as independent Go services and written from scratch rather than adapted from an existing open source project, Reaqt gives CIQ full ownership of the codebase and lets the product evolve on its own roadmap.

Ascender Registry lets administrators create repositories, pull specific collections and versions down from Ansible Galaxy, and host them locally, restricting exactly which collections and versions users are allowed to run. Teams can publish their own private collections the same way, and Registry doubles as a container registry for execution environments, all served through the same API structure as upstream Galaxy, so existing Ansible tooling works without changes.

Federated Inventories solves a problem most teams have learned to work around by hand: a ticketing system, a monitoring tool or a vulnerability scanner typically knows a hostname, not which of a dozen inventories that host lives in. Federated Inventories groups existing inventories together while preserving each one's own variables and instance group assignments, then automatically determines which underlying inventory a target host lives in when a job runs, splitting one request across as many environments as necessary with no extra setup.

"Enterprises running Linux at scale have been stuck choosing between an automation platform that does everything and one they can actually own and trust. That's the problem we set out to solve with this release. Ascender Pro gives operations teams a way to detect a problem, control what's running in their environment, and get the fix to exactly the right host, automatically, all built from the ground up on our own roadmap. Galaxy Proxy solves a problem the entire Ansible community shares, so we're giving it back as open source. It's the same principle behind everything we build at CIQ: own your infrastructure, control your own destiny and never be at the mercy of somebody else's roadmap. Full ownership where it matters, real contribution back to the community that got us here, that's what building infrastructure the right way looks like," said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO and founder of CIQ and founder of Rocky Linux.

Ascender Galaxy Proxy started as a fix for a real problem: public Ansible Galaxy responses can be slow or unavailable, and that drags down CI/CD pipelines and project syncs that depend on them. Galaxy Proxy sits between Ansible and Galaxy and caches every response, not just collection downloads, cutting typical wait times by as much as 75 to 80 percent. CIQ is releasing it as open source for any Ansible user, including those running AWX or another Ansible-based platform, while Ascender Pro customers get the full Registry application on top of it.

"For our customers, this release isn't about matching a feature checklist; it's about giving operations teams their time back. Federated Inventories alone removes a routing problem that used to require its own tooling or a manual step, and paired with Reaqt's automatic remediation, a single alert can turn into a fix on exactly the right host without anyone standing in the middle," said Bjorn Hovland, President of CIQ.

Ascender Reaqt, Ascender Registry and Federated Inventories are available now to existing Ascender Pro customers. Ascender Galaxy Proxy is available today as an open source project.

To see the full platform in action, CIQ is hosting a live webinar, "How to run your whole Ansible lifecycle on one platform," on July 30 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT, featuring Brian Rieb and the engineer who built Ascender Pro, Jimmy Conner. The session walks through what the integrated platform looks like in practice: a fix launching in seconds before a small problem becomes an outage, every action recording itself so the proof exists before anyone asks, and one launch running across the whole estate. Registration is open now.

About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ's products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Cristin Connelly
Cathey Communications for CIQ
[email protected]

SOURCE CIQ