While automation was once feared for its job-stealing potential, it’s now increasingly seen as a powerful tool to make work easier, save time and even address skill gaps in technology teams. The result is that it has spread across organizations.

Red Hat Inc.’s Ansible Automation platform stands out in this movement, increasingly expanding its offerings. In addition to taking automation everywhere, from the edge to cloud and container environments, it has also enhanced the experience for different business users.

“Now we have edge computing, which is sometimes a lot more of the same, but also it comes with a different dynamic of how it has to be sort of used and utilized by different use cases, different industry segments,” said Richard Henshall (pictured, left), senior manager of product management at Red Hat. “But then, while you expand the use cases to make sure that people can do automation where they need to do it … you also have to think about who’s now using automation.”

Henshall and Thomas Anderson (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Red Hat, spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AnsibleFest 2021. They discussed how automation is expanding within companies, the role of the Ansible platform in this scenario, and what to expect for the future. (* Disclosure below.)

Democratizing automation

Traditionally, the people who used Ansible to automate their subsystems were the domain experts for those subsystems, such as the storage operations and network operations teams that automated their daily tasks, according to Anderson. Now what Ansible is being asked to do is expose these subsystems to other constituents of the organization.

This means that the automation required is different and that it is necessary to reinforce governance and compliance around the exposed subsystems to make domain owners comfortable to share that. This also implies that automation needs to give these third parties, whether they are developers, quality engineers or business manager, an interface that is user-friendly and easy to access.

Ansible is making sure to address all of these points.

“It’s kind of the democratization. I know it’s a cliche, but [it is] the democratization of automation within organizations, giving them roles, specific experiences of how they can access these different subsystems and speed their access to these systems and deploy applications,” Anderson concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during AnsibleFest 2021. (* 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