Vendors are hard at work adapting their products to support the containerized workloads that are starting to appear in enterprise environments. One of the companies at the forefront of the push is Red Hat Inc., which today introduced a new native Docker management tool for Ansible, the popular automation framework it acquired last year.

Users will now be able to deploy and define the behavior of containerized applications in the same interface where they control the other components of their infrastructure. Policies are inputted in the form of Playbooks, which can be used to perform everything from setting up an AWS instance to orchestrating multi-stage update outs. They play an analogous role to Puppet’s Modules and the Cookbooks in Chef, the two most popular configuration automation tools on the market. Red Hat says that using native functionality is more convenient than opening an external tool like Docker Compose or Dockerfile in a separate tab and constantly switching back and forth during development.

The usefulness of the new management mechanism could increase even further if the company were to add support for other container technologies later down the line, notably CoreOS’s rkt and Canonical Ltd.’s LXD project. For the time being, however, Red Hat is focusing its efforts on more established technologies. The new Docker tool for Ansible is rolling out in conjunction with Kubernetes integration that makes it possible to similarly configure the orchestration framework using Playbooks. The company will likely continue expanding its support for third party container tools over time in a bid to support a broader range of use cases.

At the same time, Red Hat is also working to expand the adoption of its own management technologies. The company recently added hybrid cloud capabilities to its OpenStack distribution in an effort to court organizations that seek to link their on- and off-premise infrastructure. And shortly before that, it launched an effort to target startups working to develop blockchain applications.

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