Starting as an open-source software provisioning and application deployment tool, Ansible was quickly adopted by a strong community of early users. Then Ansible inc. was acquired by Red Hat in 2015 with the intention of creating smoother experiences for those who didn’t have the skills to code for automation.

In recent years, Ansible’s community has grown exponentially and is now not only developing code, but creating content that runs automation. 

With Ansible, each of these automations can be either deployed right from a playbook that the community has shared or saved as a playbook to contribute to the community. With the newly available Ansible Automation Platform, the enterprise will be capable of embracing automation with the help from the community and the thousands of available playbooks, according to Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat Inc.

“The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules — playbooks,  has exploded,” Fitzgerald said. “You know, teams can be far more productive. It really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible’s automated network storage and compute in the same playbook.”

Fitzgerald spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AnsibleFest event in Atlanta, Georgia. They discussed the Ansible Automation Platform, the community, cloud 2.0, and automation playbooks (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: The Ansible Automation Platform is something that’s been going on for a while. Now it’s a platform. What’s in the platform? Why is it important? Why should customers care? 

Fitzgerald: In working with a lot of customers, what we saw the need for was really to help them collaborate and scale their automation efforts. Scale who could build, reuse, share, score content, and track it. So, we put a lot of those efforts into the platform to take it to the next level.

Furrier: So, what are you most proud of? What’s the most notable thing? Is it the growth of the Ansible journey? 

Fitzgerald: Ansible was this small, Eastern U.S. company with sort of a community-cult following but very small in terms of commercials and reach. Over the past four years, probably the best thing we did that Red Hat is really good at is we let the community do what the community does best. The innovation, the number of contributors, the amount of Ansible integration modules, playbooks has exploded. 

So, we didn’t perturb the community; we actually helped it grow, and we’ve been able to help the technology evolve from a config automation product in technology into this very broad spectrum enterprise automation platform that crosses domains.

Furrier: Thinking about cloud complexities as people start looking at the cloud equation hybrid and Cloud 2.0 and the enterprise, how are you guys taking Ansible to the next level? How do you guys look at managing those complexities that are around the corner?  

Fitzgerald: If you’re an organization and you’re running multicloud, you’re responsible for automating things that might span these clouds. You don’t want to have different silos and automation tools and teams that only work in one cloud or one environment. Ansible can automate across these on-premise and multiple public clouds across domains, networks, storage, compute, create accounts — do all sorts of things that you’re going to need to do. 

Furrier: [Scale] is also changing the people’s equation. I want you to explain your vision on this. People have told us that automation provides great efficiency,  good security, but jobs satisfaction is a “people challenge.” Your view on the scale and people? 

Fitzgerald: You’ll see some [Ansible] customer testimonials here, where the amount of time goes down from six hours to five minutes. The teams can be far more productive. It really gives job satisfaction because they can do things that were almost impossible to automate before by using Ansible’s automated network storage and compute in the same playbook. 

Miniman: I want you to touch on the big move in the last year. IBM spending quite a few dollars to acquire Red Hat. What will this mean for the reach and activity around Ansible in the community?

Fitzgerald: I think that it’s highly complimentary. IBM has very strong capabilities around management and monitoring, security, and things like that. All those things inevitably turn to automation. There are teams that have these sets of technologies that are a natural complement; whether it’s Watson driving Ansible, or security, or network monitoring driving Ansible automation, it’s a really powerful combination. 

Miniman: Help explain how important automation is — in that it’s not just a silver bullet also? 

Fitzgerald: The sort of easy description is automation is going to eliminate jobs. I think it’s more like sort of the power-tool analogy. If you had a hammer and a screwdriver before, now you’ve got a power screwdriver and a pneumatic hammer. All those sorts of additional things, they’re force multipliers for these people to do broader, bigger things faster, right. 

Furrier: As enterprises really want to crack the code on the cloud, software, automation, observability, these new categories are emerging. It kind of speaks to this Cloud 2.0. How would you describe that to folks if asked what’s the modern-era enterprise cloud architecture look like?

Fitzgerald: So I would say after all these years, the cloud is really entering its infancy. And what does that mean? We’re just starting now to appreciate what can be built in the cloud, and we’re going to get a big boost soon with 5G, which is going to increase the amount of data, the amount of, edge devices, IoT, and things like that. We’re now getting to that point where people are starting to build some really powerful cloud-based applications. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AnsibleFest event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE