An important tactic for organizations competing in today’s data-driven economy is automating inefficient processes to streamline cloud operations.

In one use case, global energy company Compañía Española de Petróleos S.A.U., known as Cepsa, reported 6,000 saved work hours, 35% more productivity, and 10-15% faster response times after automating processes using the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. The company also increased security levels thanks to fine-grained data access controls.

Cepsa isn’t alone in investing in automation to meet the scalability, speed, security and cost efficiency required to remain competitive in an insecure marketplace. Market insight firm Gartner Inc. predicts that 70% of companies will have implemented some level of infrastructure and operations automation by 2025.

“Automation is essential for I&O to scale for the rising demands of digital business,” said Yinuo Geng, vice president at Gartner, in a comment on the report’s findings. “I&O automation technologies can support IT in enabling speed to market, increasing business agility, ensuring compliance with security and regulatory requirements and optimizing service costs.”

The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation is the theme of AnsibleFest 2022.

On October 18-19, theCUBE will be joining Red Hat and the Ansible community in Chicago for the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. Join theCUBE industry analysts as members of the Ansible community and partner ecosystem and Red Hat executives stop by our mobile livestreaming studio to discuss advances in open-source automation and give theCUBE an insider’s look at new features and product announcements. (* Disclosure below.)

Alongside the live interviews will be expert analyst sessions where theCUBE and guests dissect breaking news from AnsibleFest and provide a nuanced assessment of the infrastructure automation market.

Automating processes is essential, but implementation isn’t easy

While automation adoption is on the rise, only 21% of infrastructure and operations leaders are achieving high levels of success from their I&O automation projects, according to Gartner’s research. A lack of trained staff able to implement automation and the inability to identify which processes will return the highest return on investment through automation are both challenges affecting this low statistic.

Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform was built on a vision of providing “frictionless IT,” a goal that is even more important as hybrid and multicloud environments continue to create complexity headaches for DevOps engineers. As Cepsa and many other Ansible use-case examples show, implementation of automation using the Ansible Automation Platform brings benefits, not headaches. And the company reports that customer conversations revolve around how they want to automate more processes to optimize their cloud configurations.

While the Ansible the world knows today evolved from Red Hat’s acquisition of IT automation startup Ansible in 2015, the project’s roots can be traced back to Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies group in early 2012.

“As a developer myself, I wanted to write development code; I didn’t want to spend 50% of my time fighting with the automation tooling and have the automation itself be a source of frustration,” wrote project founder Michael DeHaan in a post recounting Ansible’s origin story. “I wanted to help all of these IT environments I was finding myself in and also help myself as a consumer of those environments.”

Red Hat doubles down on reducing friction

A decade after Red Hat’s acquisition of Ansible, smoothing the developer experience is a common driving force for innovation. This has led to a proliferation of automation tools that simplify infrastructure configuration in an expanding market. In 2019, Flexera Software LLC’s “State of the Cloud” report showed that 41% of organizations used Ansible. This year, the report shows a drop to 27% as cloud configuration management tools offered by hyperscalers AWS, Microsoft and Google take market share.

It’s a tricky comparison to place an open-source tool such as Ansible against cloud templates offered by the providers themselves. In the independent vendors, Ansible still leads longtime players Chef, Puppet and Salt/SaltStack by a significant margin, although HashiCorp’s Terraform has a 30% share to Ansible’s 27%.

In addition, Ansible has longstanding collaborative partnerships with AWS, Microsoft and Google. AWS has been supported from Ansible’s inception, and there are now close to 100 Ansible modules supporting AWS capabilities out of the box. Red Hat’s partnership with Microsoft is also strong, with the company announcing the managed service Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure during Red Hat Summit 2022. Ansible also offers integrations with the Google Cloud Platform, and Google is an active contributor to the Ansible community.

It’s all part of Ansible’s larger goal to democratize access to automation across the organization and reduce the current skills gap. As of writing, there are over 300,000 open positions requiring Ansible skills listed on LinkedIn.

“We are doubling down on reducing the friction,” said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager of the Management Business Unit at Red Hat, in an interview with theCUBE. “We want to help any user, regardless of their skills, to adopt automation.”

This mission statement will be echoed during AnsibleFest 2022 through its focus on transforming enterprise and industry through automation. During day one of the conference the main stage will have a focus on automation today, with discussions on how to optimize automation use. Then day two is set to look to the future, with keynotes focused on innovation in automation and how the technology is evolving. Through it all, theCUBE’s analysts will be digging into these developments and getting the in-depth answers the community needs to know.

Look out for AnsibleFest keynote speakers and CUBE alumni to stop by theCUBE to discuss their sessions. So, mark your calendar for Oct 18-19, and tune in to theCUBE’s coverage of AnsibleFest 2022 to get the latest news hot from the main stage and exclusive insights from the open-source community.

TheCUBE event livestream

Don’t miss theCUBE’s coverage of AnsibleFest 2022 on Oct. 18-19. Plus, you can watch theCUBE’s event coverage on-demand after the live event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch theCUBE’s coverage of AnsibleFest 2022, 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.

SiliconANGLE also has analyst deep dives in our Breaking Analysis podcast, available on iTunes, Stitcher and Spotify.

Guests

Stay tuned for a complete list of expert guests to appear on theCUBE during our coverage of AnsibleFest 2022.

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

Image: SiliconANGLE