On 29 and 30 September, Red Hat’s usual annual conference will take place: Ansible Fest 2021.
The virtual event will feature the introduction of several updates to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, as well as new integrations between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for Kubernetes.
This latter announcement represents a significant step forward in the effort to integrate Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes operations more closely with traditional Data Center automation activities and to set the table for broader automation support for OpenShift, including IBM Cloud Paks and applications running on Red Hat OpenShift in public clouds, including IBM Cloud and Azure.
Event highlights
The free automation event will be designed to connect communities and encourage collaboration.
Join developers, administrators and IT decision-makers at Ansible Fest to explore the ways in which Open Source technologies can help you automate, innovate and accelerate.
- Customer spotlight:
Find out how Blue Cross and Blue Shield NC are transforming their focus on service with Red Hat and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
- New Forrester Wave report
Forrester Wave: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform emerged as a leader thanks to the solution’s integration capabilities and its model change capabilities.
- Getting started with hosted services
- Automating tasks across your IT organisation delivers a strong ROI and efficiency benefits; in fact, an IDC study of our customers found an incredible 5-year ROI of 498% on this solution, as well as greater efficiency in infrastructure management and application development
- Migrating to Ansible Collections
Find out all about Ansible Collections! We will discuss Ansible Collections, what they are, how to use them and how to migrate your existing playbooks to use Collections.
Register now here:⬇️
https://www.ansible.com/ansiblefest
The IDC 2020 Report
Before being acquired by Red Hat in October 2015, the Ansible Open Source community was focused almost exclusively on automating server configuration and DevOps infrastructure as code.
After the acquisition, Red Hat did a good job of maintaining the community and extending Ansible’s automation footprint to different domains and roles, including network, security, storage and cloud administrators and SRE Teams.
How does Ansible work?
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration and many other IT needs.
Designed for multi-tier deployments from day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all your systems are interconnected, rather than just managing one system at a time.
It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it is easy to deploy and, above all, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allows you to describe your automation jobs.
EFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs to them, called “Ansible modules”.
These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system.
Ansible then pushes these modules (over SSH by default) and removes them when finished.
Your library of modules can reside on any machine, and no servers, daemons or databases are required.
Typically you will work with your favourite terminal program, a text editor and probably a version control system to keep track of changes to your content.
Key points to consider
The conventional infrastructure as code (IaC) market landscape has changed in recent years, with significant recent consolidation.
In September, Chef was acquired by Progress Software, and then just weeks later, SaltStack was acquired by VMware.
The adoption of more Cloud-Native technologies has begun to suppress long-term demand for traditional standalone configuration management and standalone IaC solutions.
For example, Chef has expanded its product portfolio beyond IaC, creating new products such as the Chef Habitat application delivery framework and Chef InSpec for security and compliance rules, and Puppet continues to work to diversify its product portfolio with a growing emphasis on event-driven automation and security.
The Ansible community has always benefited from strong support from DevOps teams, who are often also strong advocates of adopting Cloud-Native and Microservice architectures.
With the availability of the Content Collection for OpenShift and Kubernetes Core and the release of the Ansible Resource Operator for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, Red Hat has added important building blocks to keep DevOps teams engaged with Ansible Automation even as application architectures evolve and more workloads migrate to distributed and connected cloud architectures.
During Ansible Fest, Red Hat executives underlined their commitment to the continued expansion of Ansible to support emerging requirements around edge systems and event-driven applications, including the many edge and IoT solutions that are expected to be based on containerised workloads.
The company also provided insights into the development of a new automation mesh that can connect the Ansible control plane with execution nodes running anywhere for complete end-to-end automation.
The breadth and depth of the Ansible Fest announcements are important reminders for enterprise architects and automation leaders. Successful transitions to the cloud and containers will be built on continued, efficient support and integrations with more traditional applications and infrastructure that will need to be maintained for many years.
An integrated Cross-Cloud automation platform will support this transition by reducing operational friction as Team roles, skills and responsibilities evolve.
For enterprises that want to keep their own internally validated and curated collections and/or want to host Certified Collection content on premises, Red Hat announced the availability, expected in November
2020, of the Private Automation Hub.
This release will include On-Premises support for the Ansible Automation Services Catalog, including connectors to ITSM platforms such as BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.
You might also be interested in this article:⬇️
