Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced several upgrades to its enterprise automation platform, including the latest version of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform with new Red Hat Certified Ansible Content Collections, automation services catalog and private Automation Hub.

In a related announcement, Red Hat previewed an integration between Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management and Ansible Automation Platform, bridging the divide between traditional IT environments and cloud native, container-based solutions. This integration unites two of Red Hat's industry-leading platforms, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform, to drive automation across the open hybrid cloud.

With dynamic global challenges requiring rapid adjustments in operational domains and environments, automation projects have helped mitigate the complexity that these conditions produced and provides faster responses to changing business requirements. Bringing together teams for improved collaboration, these new services and offerings ultimately connect business managers with automation leaders to better align automation strategies with the needs of the business and expand how automation can be invoked.

Additional Certified Content Collections: in-demand automation code made more readily available

Introduced in 2019, Ansible Content Collections provide a standardized method for automation developers to build and package automation content, and for implementers to consume them in a portable and scalable way. Ansible Content Collections bring guardrails and structure to automation content, packaging Collections into categories based on automation domain or platform. Collections delivered in Ansible Automation Hub are certified by the Ansible partner network and are tested, validated and fully supported for enterprise-class production environments. 

The newest version of Ansible Automation Platform is slated to include newly certified Ansible Content Collections for Red Hat OpenShift, Kubernetes Core and VMware vSphere REST API. These Collections showcase Red Hat’s continued commitment to automating cloud and Kubernetes platforms for modern IT. Hybrid cloud use cases have pressed forward, whether it’s utilizing native Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift, these Certified Content Collections enable automation for various container management systems.

With the addition of these new Collections, there are now more than 55 Ansible Content Collections available from Red Hat and its partners in Automation Hub; you can view a full list of supported and certified Ansible Content Collections.

Building internal automation content communities with private Automation Hub

Ansible Automation Hub is a managed cloud service to provide easy access to certified Ansible content for customers, maintained by Red Hat and our partners. As automation efforts expand across organizations, individual teams often look to integrate automation as part of their overall IT strategy, while IT leaders want the ability to ensure security and manageability of unsupported content. Private Automation Hub delivers a central location for internal automation communities to manage and curate their Ansible content privately, using trusted content from Red Hat, its partners and internal developers.

Private Automation Hub enables content creators as part of enterprises to collaborate and publish trusted, verified resources from a single source, helping to streamline Ansible code within an organization and create a knowledge guide for automation newcomers. More advanced teams can still use this content as a basis for automation, while the organization as a whole gains the ability to manage and control the lifecycle of Ansible automation content as needs scale across the hybrid cloud.

Driving customized automation for the open hybrid cloud

Announced at Red Hat Summit 2020, the automation services catalog makes enterprise-specific, pre-approved, curated automation available to infrastructure and application teams, as well as to business users. This capability helps provide IT administrators and security operations teams with greater visibility over what is being automated while not slowing down organization-wide automation practices. With the addition of the connector technology in the automation services catalog, customers can now bring the automation services catalog directly and more securely to their own private infrastructure, enhancing control over what automation practices are being used.

The connector technology also enables organizations to maintain business-specific controls and compliance mechanisms, while developers can still access the information they need, faster. New integrations for Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) also extends the automation services catalog to platforms like BMC Remedy and ServiceNow, reducing friction in proactively completing ITSM rulesets and standards tasks. This can help drive greater efficiency for teams that are seeking to make Ansible automation a key part of their overall business strategy and not simply a siloed IT component. 

Automation as an enterprise imperative

Red Hat acquired Ansible in 2015, and since then, the world of IT has changed.

Organizations now understand that automation can provide faster responses to changing business requirements, and provides the capability to automate more aspects of a business as a driver for future plans. According to a 2020 Forrester report commissioned by Red Hat, automation is a necessity; three out of five respondents reported automation as one of their firms’ top initiatives, even amid competing priorities like adoption of cloud, containers and security management. This imperative for automation has fueled momentum around Ansible, making it a leader in infrastructure automation platforms today:

• Organizations across industries are running Ansible Automation Platform to manage global operations, freeing up IT teams to focus on digital transformation and business-level innovations. 
• IT automation knowledge is now frequently cited amongst the most in-demand job skills.

Ansible Automation Platform enables customers to move away from do-it-yourself, siloed approaches and to improve ROI. These customers are automating millions of nodes with Ansible as part of a modernization of management approach.

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat, said: “Ansible has evolved into a defacto standard for automation and has become one of the top 10 open source projects in the world. Red Hat has built an automation platform for enterprises to more easily access, consume and share Ansible content to significantly reduce the time-to-automation. As customers continue down the path of digital transformation, these pre-integrated resources can address common use cases while advancing the management and innovation of traditional and cloud-native infrastructure.”

Michael McCarthy, Delivery Architect, Production Engineering Group, Gamesys. added: “We began our automation journey with the community edition of Ansible, but due to the size of our estate, we quickly upgraded to Ansible Automation Platform for its management capabilities. We progressed from simply automating our infrastructure deployments to incorporating network, OpenStack and Kubernetes processes as well. Next, we’re looking to make our new automation projects even faster, with Ansible Content Collections serving as an ideal solution to help us achieve just that. Ansible Automation Platform has clearly been a game-changer for us.”

Availability

The latest innovations available in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, including Ansible Content Collections, and private Automation Hub, are available now on cloud.redhat.com. The connector technology in the automation services catalog is now available in technology preview. We plan to release new Collections on a rolling basis.