Executors are advanced functionality that allow for extending the automation and orchestration capabilities of ICO to control platforms and systems, which are not natively integrated with Intersight.
NOTE: While functionality of executors has been covered in detail in the 'Breakdown of ICO Tasks' section, it is important to highlight these within this component level workflow overview so they are not overlooked from a workflow perspective.
Executors allow for running scripts within a on-prem customer environment via PowerShell or SSH, along with running IaC configuration within a on-prem customer environment via Ansible, or invoking an API request to either publicly accessible APIs from Intersight, along with private APIs access to an Intersight Virtual Assist appliance.
Executors also allow users to leverage ICO to be the orchestration engine for any of these scripting/API requests that they handle in another fashion, to give customers the ability to quickly utilize ICO to centralize existing orchestration functions and make them accessible to users in a simple cloud-based GUI.
Both Ansible and SSH executors can run both embedded and reusable tasks, which have different use cases and investments in configuration to be used within a workflow. Embedded tasks can leverage either existing automation within a customer environment, which can essentially be something like standalone scripts/playbooks that are injected into an ICO workflow. Reusable tasks are essentially more generic tasks that can be fed input variables from other workflow tasks, and allow for more flexibility, while also requiring more configuration to handle the injection of external values.
Executors can also leverage a very powerful templating engine that can give much more advanced configuration options which can go far beyond built-in vendor tasks. The Intersight Help documentation covers the template engine syntax within each specific page for Task Executors.