Much as today’s automobiles have become computers on wheels, the same can be said for railway systems as well. In Switzerland, the nation’s modern railway system– Swiss Federal Railways or SBB — moves 810,000 passengers per day and has become a major user of Red Hat Inc.’s open-source automation Ansible technology for automating IT infrastructure and complex deployments to keep the trains running on time.

SBB brought configuration time for each train down from five days to three hours by replacing a manual process with Ansible. It is one of many examples of how automation will transform enterprises as the Red Hat platform becomes more widely adopted and smarter at the same time.

“It’s phases of maturity; different teams are adopting automation at their own rate and pace,” said Stephen Elliot, group vice president of I&O, cloud operations and DevOps at IDC, in an interview with theCUBE. “That said, the automation platforms have to be able to adjust from automation with manual intervention to fully autonomous automation that makes decisions, eventually with an understanding of the real-time situation and environment.”

Red Hat’s free, virtual AnsibleFest 2021 will be held September 29-30, when developers, administrators, IT decision makers, and partners will share insights on open-source technologies and new ways to automate, innovate and accelerate. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will provide coverage of the event beginning at 8 a.m. PDT on September 29. Red Hat’s livestream will include interviews with Walter Bentley, senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat; Robyn Bergeron, senior manager of Ansible Automation at Red Hat; Joe Mills, director of strategy and transformation at Discover; and Devi Sankar, principal engineer at United Airlines. (* Disclosure below.)

Fueling app modernization

Red Hat’s Ansible Automation is positioned to play a key role in application modernization. Apps increasingly must run on demand closer to where the data resides, and that means automating more operations at the edge.

Research and Markets Ltd. projects that the global market for application modernization will more than double in size, reaching $24.8 billion by 2025. This means that legacy applications will need to become more cloud native, a process for which automation is tailor-made.

Red Hat has honed its strategy to address this need through the integration of Ansible Automation Platform with Advanced Cluster Management. The result is that ACM can manage OpenShift clusters for automated system updates and server allocation, making it easier to deploy containerized, cloud native applications.

This has given Ansible a significant tailwind, six years after Red Hat acquired the platform for an amount believed to be between $100 million and $150 million.

“Ansible benefits from network effects; the reason we have gotten as big as we have is like a snowball rolling downhill,” said Robyn Bergeron, senior principal community architect, Ansible, at Red Hat, in a recent interview with theCUBE. “If I was working on any other product that I would consider being able to have automated with Ansible, I would look at what people are using. And I can guarantee you 99% of the time, everything else that people are using is also becoming automated with Ansible.”

Building block of DevOps

Red Hat’s focus on integrating Ansible with Advanced Cluster Management and OpenShift to improve DevOps efficiency is meeting a timely need in the enterprise IT market.

ACM was launched by Red Hat a little over a year ago as a way to manage and scale OpenShift, the firm’s enterprise Kubernetes platform, throughout the hybrid cloud. Events of the past 20 months have highlighted the importance of being able to scale up cloud infrastructure configurations quickly, leveraging hybrid environments between home and office.

This placed a premium on automated tools, where Ansible’s ability to deploy enterprise-wide protocols with the push of a button found an eager audience in the DevOps community. The automation of configuration management, cloud provisioning and orchestration frees up DevOps staff for other needs in the business.

“Automation is a building block of high-performing DevOps practices,” Elliot noted. “Red Hat customers want tighter integration across the Red Hat portfolio, and the IBM portfolio with the Ansible Automation platform. Red Hat customers are hungry for bringing together modern management capabilities with automation, notably for the Red Hat stack.”

Over 50% market share

By 2019, the RightScale “State of the Cloud” report from Flexera Software LLC noted that Ansible had risen to the top of preferred cloud management tools in a survey of IT professionals.

The research firm Slintel Inc. currently attributes over 50% of the market share for configuration management tools to Ansible, with the nearest alternative holding a 16% slice. Market dominance can change quickly in the tech world, for a wide variety of reasons, but it is clear that AnsibleFest arrives this month at a time when Red Hat’s automation offering is riding a strong wave of support.

“Red Hat is doing a good job of listening to customer feedback and executing production capabilities for its customer base,” Elliott said. “I think AnsibleFest will be customer driven as usual and focus on business outcomes and the idea of Ansible as an automation platform.”

Livestream of AnsibleFest

AnsibleFest is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access Red Hat’s live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here during the event, as well as on demand after the event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of AnsibleFest, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during AnsibleFest include Stephen Elliot, group vice president of management software and DevOps at IDC, as well as Red Hat’s Thomas Anderson, VP of product management; Richard Henshall, senior manager of product management; Carol Chen, principal community architect, Ansible; and Ashesh Badani, head of products.

TheCUBE will also speak with Red Hat’s Joe Fitzgerald, VP and general manager of the Management Business Unit, and Stefanie Chiras, senior VP of the Red Hat Platforms Business Group.

Stay tuned for a complete list of speakers.

(* 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