With the news on today of general availability for Red Hat Inc.’s Ansible Automation Platform, companies will now have an opportunity to embrace automated features across the enterprise. Key terminology in the announcement included “scale” and “easily,” designed to address the need for automation in complex hybrid and multicloud environments.

“The Ansible Automation Platform is the big news,” said John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AnsibleFest event in Atlanta, Georgia. “We saw the rise of network management turning into observability as the hottest category in the cloud. Automation is this other category that’s just exploding in growth and change.”

The platform, which Ansible calls enterprise-grade solution for building and operating automation at scale, integrates Red Hat’s Ansible Tower, Ansible Engine and Network Automation along with new cloud-based capabilities. The idea is to accelerate collaboration among teams.

Furrier and co-host Stu Miniman discussed how open-source tools such as Ansible are being used by application developers and the resulting impact on large enterprises (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Near the top in GitHub

Acquired by Red Hat in 2015, Ansible originated within the open-source community and has become an important tool for orchestrating multitier applications across clouds. Its value as a framework for automating enterprise applications has made it a popular resource among developers.

“Everything that Red Hat does is 100% open source, and that’s key to what Ansible is and how it’s created,” Miniman said. “This is the sixth most-active repository in GitHub. That tells you that this is being used by the community.”

During the keynotes at AnsibleFest on Tuesday, an executive from JPMorgan Chase and Co. described how 500 developers at the banking firm were using Ansible to automate business processes, resulting in a 98% improvement in recovery time.

“The platform of open source is evolving,” Furrier said. “What Amazon, Azure and others are doing is showing us that scale has changed the game in how open source is not only going to grow and evolve, but shape application developers. As more stuff gets scaled up, provisioned, built and created, the management and control of the configuration has been a real hot spot.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AnsibleFest. (* 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: Red Hat Ansible