The coronavirus pandemic has imposed several significant changes to organizations’ information-technology teams, such as increasing capacity and accommodating remote workers. Automation has been a means for these teams, already stretched to the limit, to meet these unprecedented demands.

With the help of the exponentially growing community of contributors and the countless playbooks available, the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform seeks to guide companies toward automation to navigate this turbulence.

“For folks that are in a traditional IT department just trying to get along day to day right now … it’s ‘I’m just glad that I continue to have this Ansible thing.’ They’re using Ansible Tower,” said Robyn Bergeron (pictured), principal community architect, Ansible, at Red Hat Inc. “They are glad that they can still manage to figure out how to collaborate with their coworkers in that type of environment.”

Bergeron spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed the need for automation in times of crisis and how Ansible is dividing its repository into collections. (* Disclosure below.)

Community to solve problems

In addition to creating a simple automation language to help organizations get started, Ansible provides ways for IT teams to solve doubts and problems that may arise in this journey, according to Bergeron.

“We have folks on [Internet Relay Chat], we have folks on Stack Overflow, there are folks literally everywhere,” she said. “You can ask a question on Twitter, and it is a pretty large, friendly, global community of people who have plenty of answers.”

Thanks to a large number of contributors — currently around 5,900 from all over the world — Ansible has a huge information repository, which grows every day. To facilitate access and management of this data, the repository will be divided, Bergeron explained.

“That stuff is actually getting split out into Ansible Collections that we’ll have or repository that’s actually more managed by the community, which will empower them to be able to make more decisions for us to be able to get things done more rapidly,” Bergeron said.

Ansible’s Collections will be pre-composed modules and roles around specific topic areas to bring flexibility and to save time and work. “We have got a handful of contributors who are adding new modules into this new repo, but they are also helping us work out all the kinks in the contributor process and how it works that way,” Bergeron concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. 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