Integration was the focus as the virtual AnsibleFest 2020 event kicked off today.

A year on from the announcement of the Ansible Automation Platform, the Ansible Collections Community is over 500 strong and growing.

“That’s the vibe: Collections, collections, collections,” said John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “They’ve grown their Collections Community from five supported platforms to 50. And they launched the automation services catalog.”

Furrier and co-host Jeff Frick discussed their analysis and takeaways during the first day of AnsibleFest 2020.  (* Disclosure below.)

Ansible is the Babel Fish of automation

Following the open-source ethos, Ansible is the “core community” for the future development environment, according to Furrier. “Easy to consume, easy to code, easy to troubleshoot. Add built-in security and make it collaborative. That’s the open-source ethos, and that’s really the focus of AnsibleFest 2020 virtual,” he said.

Automation has always been core to Ansible. Now the platform is taking automation across multiple environments and out to the edge. “It’s multicloud,” Furrier added.

Unpacking the concept of collections, Furrier links the idea of writing code in a collection with integrations. The IBM z/OS  integration is a good example of how Ansible is bringing modern capabilities to mainframes, according to Furrier.

“This speaks to how people are working with these new roles and can leverage code in a new way,” he said. “That’s the real big thing about providing that last-mile innovation and bringing it in other environments. Not just being on Ansible, but really integrating in with others.”

The magic of automation plus cloud

The OpenShift + Ansible connection is another area that is getting attention, as it brings the hybrid cloud automation to the continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline.

“When you take Red Hat’s OpenShift, which is the cloud platform, and you bring it to the automation platform of Ansible, it allows customers to have an easy-to-use capability to do hybrid and multicloud automation,” Furrier said.

As the surface area of things to automate grows, engineers have to be involved early to bake security in from the beginning, according to Furrier.

“Edge is real and you’ve got to have a software-defined operational model,” he said. “You’ve got to have a cloud piece like OpenShift, and you’ve got to have an automation component like Ansible. It’s a good fit. Automation with cloud: That’s where the magic is.”

Here’s the complete video analysis, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest 2020. Neither Red Hat, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Red Hat