Speed matters in a time of crisis, and when a global pandemic forced much of the world to suddenly move online, cloud infrastructure configurations had to be scaled up quickly. This placed a premium on automated tools, which was one reason why Ansible, a solution from Red Hat Inc. that allowed enterprise-wide protocols to be deployed with a mouse click, suddenly received a lot of interest.

Ansible’s popularity in the DevOps world has been driven by the tool’s ability to reduce the time needed to deploy infrastructure and applications. By automating configuration management, orchestration and cloud provisioning, DevOps staff are freed up to do more business-related strategic work.

How Red Hat intends to position Ansible in light of recent expansion of capabilities involving OpenShift, its enterprise Kubernetes platform, will be one of the key themes worth watching at the upcoming Red Hat AnsibleFest 2020 virtual event on October 13-14.

“Automation connected up to that environment becomes really important,” said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager of management and automation at Red Hat, during a recent interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. “You’re going to see us pushing Ansible even further into areas like Kubernetes and OpenShift at AnsibleFest.”

TheCUBE will be broadcasting interviews as part of the AnsibleFest virtual gathering, and discussion will focus on the latest product news, the importance of automation in the developer toolkit, how COVID has shifted priorities in 2020, and Red Hat’s focus on security and new solutions at the edge. (* Disclosure below.) 

New features and major integrations

AnsibleFest participants have had plenty of news to digest leading up to this month’s event. In April, Red Hat updated the Ansible platform to include improved analytics capabilities and released new features and enhancements for simplified automation in June.

At the end of July, Red Hat broke the news that Ansible’s automation platform would be deployed in over 10,000 devices used in service infrastructure by NTT DoCoMo Inc., the top cell phone service provider in Japan. A key driver for NTT DoCoMo was Ansible’s ability to set up and manage the firm’s storage, servers, network and operating system.

“We adopted Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to assist with individually optimized automation and improve integrated automation environments to minimize any significant human interventions needed for developmental and operational process responses,” said Kazunori Iida, senior manager, Service Design Department at NTT DoCoMo, in a statement accompanying the announcement.

Perhaps more significantly, Ansible’s integration in major enterprise platforms also includes those of Red Hat’s parent company — IBM. In March, Ansible Certified Content was made available for the IBM Z platform. Users of IBM Z/OS can now participate in Ansible’s enterprise automation solutions.

Wearing a Red Hat

At an IBM virtual conference for Power users in September, participants heard a presentation titled “IBM i Wears a Red Hat.” The focus was on benefits of the Red Hat acquisition for the IBM i integrated operating environment and AIX operating system.

Ansible is once again envisioned to play a key role. IBM previously announced that it would bring Ansible’s playbooks, modules and action plug-ins to the IBM i operating environment. Of particular interest to developers was Red Hat’s ability to help manage environments with proprietary  programming languages, such as RPG.

“Whether your running RPG or COBOL applications, all of that technology can seamlessly be integrated with the Red Hat OpenShift platform for that modern wave of applications that’s on us now,” said Joe Cropper, senior technical staff member of Power Systems hybrid multicloud solutions at IBM, during the September event. “Power is a great place to run those workloads.”

This embrace of Ansible’s open-source capabilities highlights another important role for the Red Hat solution: Software can be a unifying factor for many businesses. The core concept behind an enterprise-wide approach to automation should envelop ways that people and processes can work together and achieve critical business results.

“One of the things I took away from last year’s event was that it’s great when software can actually be a unifying factor inside a company,” said industry analyst Stu Miniman. “This year, they’ve got Blue Cross/Blue Shield  and T-Mobile sharing not only what their developers do, but the business outcomes, which is so important.”

AnsibleFest attracted 14,000 participants to Atlanta in 2019. At a time when tech conference events have been forced to go virtual, the size of online access globally has boosted registrations significantly. The numbers already exceed last year’s gathering, and Red Hat would not be surprised to see an even larger audience for its upcoming event.

“We’re currently over 15,000 people registered for AnsibleFest,” Fitzgerald noted. “The level of interest globally across personas for AnsibleFest is just amazing. It would not surprise me to see it go much higher than that.”

Livestream of AnsibleFest 2020

AnsibleFest 2020 is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, 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 who will be interviewed on theCUBE during AnsibleFest 2020

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during AnsibleFest 2020 include Red Hat executives Chris Wright, senior vice president and chief technology officer; Joe Fitzgerald, VP and general manager of management and automation; Jason Smith, VP of North America consulting; Ashesh Badani, senior VP of cloud platforms; Stefanie Chiras, senior VP and GM of the RHEL Business Unit; Joe Fernandes, VP and GM of core cloud platforms; Tom Anderson, VP of the Ansible automation platform; and Dave Lindquist, VP and GM of engineering and hybrid cloud management

Also appearing are Red Hat’s Walter Bentley, senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat Inc.; Robyn Bergeron, senior principal community architect, Ansible; Matt Jones, senior principal software engineer, Ansible; Brad Thornton, lead architect of Ansible network automation; Adam Miller, senior principal software engineer of security automation; and Jill Rouleau, senior software engineer, Ansible;

Plus, theCUBE will talk with Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president of cloud management at International Data Corp.; Mandy Whaley, senior director of DevNet and Cisco certifications at Cisco Systems Inc.; Gamesys’ Michael McCarthy, delivery architect of delivery engineering and Jurgen Grech, technical architect; and Skyla Loomis, vice president of the IBM Z application platform at IBM.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest 2020. 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