Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 Drives Cloud-Native Automation and Helps Developers Become Automators

Cloud , IT Innovations
29.09.2021 06:21 pm

Industry’s leading IT automation platform now re-architected for deploying portable automation at massive scale across hybrid clouds and edge environments while shifting automation left into application development

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 as the company’s new standard for hybrid cloud automation. Refined for the evolving realities of computing at hybrid cloud scale, the latest version of the platform adds self-contained automation capabilities while shifting automation more deeply into the application development lifecycle.

In a study commissioned by Red Hat, 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, noted that respondents in its recent Voice of the Enterprise: DevOps, Organizational Dynamics survey identified the top cultural challenges of DevOps as overcoming resistance to change (35%), promoting communication between teams not accustomed to working together (34%) and breaking down silos (33%). As organization-wide collaboration becomes a priority, so does the need for product and IT teams to standardize automation practices around the needs of the business while extending automation use cases to drive greater efficiency.

Hybrid cloud-native automation for a cloud-native world

As hybrid and multicloud computing become critical IT components, IT organizations need automation platforms that can bridge traditional systems with these modern services, stretching from the enterprise datacenter to remote network edges. Ansible Automation Platform 2 is now fully restructured for a hybrid cloud-native world, making it easier for IT teams to address automation needs at scale across varied environments and systems in a standardized way. With the automation controller (formerly Ansible Tower), users can more reliably and consistently scale automation on demand, taking a systematic approach to standardizing automation practices while helping to reduce automation irregularities across the enterprise.

Further addressing the need for automation at scale across the open hybrid cloud is automation mesh within Ansible Automation Platform. The capability connects disparate automation components together and provides status checks on automation environments across the IT estate. Automation mesh is designed to connect across diverse environments with dispersed networks for more flexibility and resiliency without sacrificing security features, so enterprises can better adopt and scale automation.

Shifting left: Self-contained automation for developers AND IT operations

With automation now spanning the hybrid cloud, the associated tools are no longer the domain of specialists. Both IT operations teams and developers must now be enabled as automators, but to do so requires automation technology that is easily portable, flexible and scalable to stretch across IT footprints. Ansible Automation Platform 2 helps extend the role of automator across the IT organization with its cloud-native architecture and new collaboration and developer tools for creating, testing, distributing and managing automation content.

Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduces the concept of automation execution environments (taking the place of Ansible Engine), which deliver self-contained automation spaces that can be easily replicated and repeated across an organization. This helps teams scale and speed up the delivery of automation tooling across environments while also significantly reducing the operational overhead and complexity of maintaining a standard automation platform that spans the open hybrid cloud.

Additionally, automation content navigator helps teams more quickly validate that automation content is working as it should across even the largest environments. This helps automators, from developers to sysadmins, maintain operational consistency across their systems, from developer workstations to staging platforms to production.

The automation platform for Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud and edge portfolio

Improved collaboration breaks down workflow and development silos between traditional servers and virtual machines and cloud-native clusters running Red Hat OpenShift. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Operator integrates Ansible Automation Platform directly with Red Hat OpenShift, enabling smoother cloud-native deployment of automation clusters, easier management and migration of data and platform performance upgrades further cementing automation into cloud-native processes.

Red Hat is the expert in Ansible automation, which is why Red Hat Insights is well-suited to keep automation delivering optimal outcomes across the open hybrid cloud. The service now contains the former Automation Analytics components with added features that include:

Advisor for analyzing automation controllers against a set of recommendations from Red Hat’s deep experience in the space that assess availability, performance, stability and system security.
Drift for creating an automation controller baseline that helps drive configuration consistency and better identify issues through historical system data analysis.
Policies enables organizations to create unique internal policies that can identify and eliminate problem scenarios specific to their environment.

Availability

Ansible Automation Platform 2 Early Access is now available for all existing and prospective customers. Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 is slated to be generally available in November 2021.

Supporting Quotes

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager, Ansible Business Unit, Red Hat

“We are seeing many organizations shift their automation priorities away from cost savings and towards agility and security. We are helping our customers to rapidly evolve their culture and processes, to automate at enterprise scale, some with tens of thousands of automation creators working across many teams and countries, sharing and reusing content. Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform 2.1 delivers next-generation architecture, collaboration and content to allow organizations to automate across their hybrid clouds."

Jay Lyman, senior research analyst, Cloud Native and DevOps, 451 Research

“While enterprises have broken down many of the barriers between different teams, particularly

development and IT operations, silos still persist. Automation can help bring together different IT teams by codifying collaboration and communication, thus bridging silos. Communities of practice – teams within organizations that have a common technical or business interest – can promote sharing of trusted automation content that helps reduce finger-pointing and drives more success.”¹

1 Source: 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, “Driving DevOps Automation”, Jay Lyman, May 2021

Michael McCarthy, delivery architect, Production Engineering Group, Gamesys

“Our current priorities at Gamesys are scaling and becoming more geographically distributed. Being able to run containerized solutions has been difficult due to our use of virtual environments, which thus impacts our scalability. As heavy users of automation controller [formerly Ansible Tower], it’s valuable for the technology we’re already using to adapt with us. The direction of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform enables us to execute automation in containerized environments, supporting new strategies for innovation in the business. Now, we can scale automation systematically across the enterprise with consistency and as demand requires to hit those two priorities with fewer barriers, using a platform that’s already integrated into our workflow.”