Red Hat Inc. introduced several new tools for its Ansible automation platform on Thursday that are designed to further the cause for automating huge enterprise information technology operations.

Ansible bills itself as a simple “IT automation engine” that automates cloud provisioning, software configuration management, application deployment and other IT tasks. The new solutions are meant to address frustration among developers and IT operations teams who must increasingly deal with multiple, complex systems and still support the operational demands of new technologies and legacy platforms.

“The scale is too great, the change is too rapid,” Justin Nemmers , general manager for Ansible at Red Hat, said during a series of presentations and briefings in San Francisco billed as AnsibleFest. “Without the right automation tools and the right approach, you will fall behind.”

Custom views for cloud platforms

Red Hat acquired Ansible in 2015 and has just released Tower 3.2, the latest version of its enterprise automation platform. New features include custom views for managing machines across private, public and hybrid clouds, and an easier way to integrate with third-party credential storage.

Although Ansible Tower has been proprietary, licensed software, Red Hat decided to ante up in its commitment to the open-source community by starting AWX Project, which will form the foundation on which Tower will reside. The Tower 3.2 release is now open source and code for AWX Project is already live on GitHub.

In a press conference following the main stage presentations at AnsibleFest, Greg DeKoenigsberg, director of Ansible Community at Red Hat, described the new project’s intent as “making ourselves available to the customer and user-driven innovation stories.” When asked about what innovations might come from AWX Project, the Red Hat executive said, “We don’t know what they are and that’s the whole point.”

The latest general release – Ansible 2.4 – will enable network operations teams to focus more strongly on the configuration state of the infrastructure through features such as aggregate resources and additional platform support.

First-time global support

Red Hat also announced a new offering called Ansible Engine, which is designed to provide enterprise-grade 24/7 global support, the first time the company has done this for Ansible’s open source automation technology. The new offering is recognition that enterprises need reliable support and an acknowledgment that Ansible’s own growth is forcing a new approach. The company provided figures on Thursday showing it now has 2,900 unique Ansible contributors and will ship over 460 networking modules with the latest release, compared with 26 modules in May of last year.

Engine will also come with a networking automation add-on that provides full engineering support for a number of systems including Cisco (IOS), Juniper (Junos OS), and Arista (EOS). “Ansible is becoming the de facto automation platform around networking,” said Peter Sprygada, senior principal networking engineer for Ansible at Red Hat.

Red Hat’s Ansible announcements were designed to address the tornado of change that is sweeping through the enterprise computing world and provide relief for beleaguered IT operations staff who are being pulled in different directions by the multitude of cloud and on-premises data management options. “IT architectures in general are growing more complex,” said Nemmers. “The bulk of these challenges end up falling on the IT operations team.”

Although Red Hat’s solutions may have appeal, the company’s executives also recognize that Ansible is not the only player in the automation game. A multitude of vendors offer automation tools, but Red Hat’s strategy is to emphasize that these require specialized skills sets and are often in silos across the enterprise.

“Automated silos are really still just silos,” said Nemmers. “We take all of these disconnected tools of automation and put them in a single approach.”

Community of contributors

With its open source roots, Ansible is built on a community of contributors and Red Hat is counting on the potential for “viral adoption” to work in its favor. To automate the configuration of multiple servers, Ansible relies on a “playbook,” which defines the work to be done. “Plays” in the playbook are controlled by module scripts, many of which are written by users in the open source community.

“It provides a whole new layer of sharing that can be really powerful,” Jim Whitehurst (pictured), chief executive of Red Hat, explained during an appearance on Thursday. “It’s user-driven innovation allowed to happen at scale.”

Red Hat’s commitment to enterprise automation has also allowed it to function in the rarefied air of the world’s biggest cloud providers. Ansible includes a suite of modules for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

In the world of athletic competition, one of the guiding principles is that “speed wins.” Red Hat uses this analogy when it talks about the value of acceleration in business. “Accelerating through automation is one of the fundamental tenets that has made Ansible very successful,” said Red Hat’s Sprygada. Now it’s up to Red Hat to keep Ansible in the race.

Photo: SiliconANGLE