In the open-source world, a tiny seed can grow into a robust tree very quickly. Ansible, an open-source software provisioning and application deployment tool, began as a project in 2012. That sprouted a separate company a year later, which was ultimately purchased by Red Hat Inc. in 2015 for over $100 million.

Since then, Ansible has emerged as an important part of Red Hat’s enterprise portfolio. Attendees at AnsibleFest in September were treated to a significant number of new enhancements for the technology, which included general availability of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

“We’re now bringing a lot of those technologies to life,” said Tim Cramer (pictured), vice president of engineering management at Red Hat. “One thing that Red Hat has done is continue to invest heavily in Ansible to bring new capabilities and new value to the subscription for everyone.”

Cramer spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience. They discussed Ansible’s growth as a provider of content from contributors, adoption by major enterprises, integration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and development work with IBM Corp. (* Disclosure below.)

Ensuring compatibility

Ansible has become “the most popular open-source automation tool on GitHub today,” with a reported quarter million downloads per month and over 3,550 contributors adding new modules, according to Red Hat. Ansible modules and plugins are developed from Red Hat’s ecosystem of cloud, network, security, and storage partners. The company has developed an Automation Certification Program to ensure compatibility and validation for work in production.

“We now have over 1,200 modules that are certified content,” Cramer said. “These are from our partners creating this content and making it stable and secure for everyone to use.”

Certified Content Collections are part of the tools that Red Hat offers developers through the Ansible Automation Platform announced eight months ago. Additional enhancements include Automation Hub and Automation Analytics to support cross-team collaboration and governance.

“Adoption on the analytics side has been taking off,” Cramer said. “We have a major bank, and we have a major manufacturer that have well over 10,000 systems providing data into Red Hat that allows us to provide analytics back on their running estate.”

Support for RHEL and Kubernetes

Red Hat has also been focused on integration of Ansible with its Enterprise Linux or RHEL operating system. This month, Red Hat announced RHEL support for IBM z15 and LinuxONE III single frame solutions. The goal is to bring cloud-native infrastructure and developer tools to IBM’s platform, leveraging the benefits of automation that Ansible’s certified content can provide. This is also expected to allow organizations to take greater advantage of Kubernetes by making it easier to manage Ansible Automation Hub running on OpenShift.

“We’ve done a lot on the RHEL side,” Cramer said. “We have a lot of customers now that really want the Ansible Automation Hub available on OpenShift as a first-class application. We’re going to integrate that into advanced container management that a team from IBM is working towards.”

When IBM released earnings in April, the company reported that Red Hat was driving most of its growth. Red Hat’s OpenShift and Ansible platforms contributed toward a 40% boost in IBM’s emerging technologies revenue during the previous quarter.

“We’re going to continue to work with the community, work with our partners, get more certified content, and scale the best way we can for all of our users and our customers,” Cramer said. “That is the key focus.”

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