The future of enterprise computing dominated day two of this week’s AnsibleFest 2020 virtual event, and it was all about the edge.

“If you want to innovate, you must automate at the edge,” Chris Wright, chief technology officer of Red Hat Inc., said in his keynote speech. “5G is entering the market. And it’s an evolution that brings about fundamental change of how connections are made and what will be connected.”

The “internet of things” at the edge is going to be people, devices and everything, according to John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “This is a huge positioning shift in the marketplace as companies have to level up and figure out the edge,” Furrier said.

Furrier and co-host Jeff Frick sat down to discuss keynote speakers and announcements from day two of AnsibleFest 2020. (* Disclosure below.)

Automation is a journey, not a one-stop shop

What is edge computing? It’s moving compute to the location where the data is gathered, as well as where it is consumed. Taking a higher-level view of automation significantly helps streamline edge computing, as Wright pointed out in his keynote address.

Rather than being a “one-stop” implementation, “really think about automation in the context of a journey where you can input it in as many processes as you can,” Frick said. One solution addressing this need is the integration of Ansible automation with RedHat OpenShift, a hybrid-cloud enterprise Kubernetes application platform.

“It is a coming-home, if you will, for all the work from OpenStack to OpenShift, to public hybrid and now multicloud and with private cloud — aka the ‘telco cloud,’” Furrier said.

Slowing the journey toward a functional IoT edge with 5G isn’t only a question of “speeds and feeds” but trust, security and skills, according to Furrier. “Who’s going to build it? Who’s going to implement it? Who’s going to manage it?” he said. “This is all a whole new generation.”

Trust was another major theme in the Ansible Fest keynotes. But the trust isn’t only on the user side; trust within the open-source developer community is also essential. Ansible can be used to build that trust, according to keynote speaker Matthew Jones, architect of the Ansible Automation Platform.

“COVID has changed the dynamic of DevOps and the way DevOps teams work, and how they work, and what they measure and how they collaborate,” Frick said. “So if you don’t have trust, that puts you in a real bad spot.”

XaaS: Easy to say, hard to do

“Everything as a service,” known as XaaS, was another topic covered during day two of AnsibleFest. “The big megatrend on the business model side is everything as a service,” Furrier said.

The aim of making everything from disco balls to server space available on-demand is simplicity, but implementing it is complex.

The conversation will shift from “’automation, automation, automation’ to ‘services, services, services,'” Furrier predicted. “Because to get to anything as a service, you have got to have the underpinnings. You’ve got to have the data. You’ve got to have the automation. These are critical architectural, foundational things.”

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: Gordon Johnson from Pixabay