Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a step forward in enterprise-wide IT automation with the integration of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. Designed to break down automation barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure, this integration is intended to help drive application modernization for IT environments breaking down the workflow and development silos between traditional servers and virtual machines and cloud-native clusters.

Ansible Automation Platform¹ and Red Hat OpenShift² are both leaders in The Forrester Wave™ and are built on leading open source projects in Ansible and Kubernetes, respectively. Launched in July 2020, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management helps enterprises better manage and scale OpenShift clusters across the hybrid cloud, lending management muscle to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. Now, Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management can work hand-in-hand, enabling enterprises to take advantage of the technologies already in use and refine them for a cloud-native future.

Connecting traditional and hybrid cloud environments with modern automation tools

Application modernization is among today’s top IT priorities. According to Gartner, “by 2022, only 40% of container management software offerings available in 2019 will still be competitive/or exist, causing many current product decisions to be tactical³.” Red Hat OpenShift provides a powerful, scalable platform for this transformation. Many organizations, however, cannot afford to simply leave existing IT systems behind, given the investments and critical workloads based on these resources. With this in mind, many IT teams are forced to split technology stacks and silo teams to address these disparate workflows, each requiring separate tools and strategies, leading to growing complexity and friction.

The integration between Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management aims to address these pain points in enterprise IT organizations by streamlining the toolsets and “handoffs” between traditional and cloud-native technologies. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management addresses the need for cloud-native management and monitoring. When application level or traditional IT workflows are needed, it acts as a control plane across Red Hat OpenShift clusters to trigger Ansible Automation Platform capabilities, such as deploying system updates, load balancers, server resources and more. The result is a single workflow to manage complex hybrid cloud environments without forcing organizations to choose between their IT needs in the here and now and those that they may require for a digital future.

As part of the integration between the two technologies, Red Hat takes advantage of OpenShift’s Kubernetes Operator foundation to further IT automation in hybrid cloud environments. Kubernetes Operators make it easier to run applications at-scale across OpenShift deployments, wherever they may exist, and with a Resource Operator for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, the technology can call on Ansible Automation Platform to execute tasks more efficiently outside of the Kubernetes cluster.

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president, Management, Red Hat, said: "By integrating Red Hat OpenShift with Ansible Automation Platform, enterprises can leverage Ansible for infrastructure management and application deployment. We believe Ansible has become a de facto automation standard, and Red Hat provides a tremendous amount of ready-to-use Ansible automation that spans domains and is curated, certified and supported."

Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president, Cloud Management at IDC, Shared Cross-Cloud Management Control Planes Become Enterprise Priority, comments: "Interest in consistent cross-cloud management and visibility is rapidly increasing as enterprises move more workloads into hybrid and multicloud infrastructure platforms, including both VM and container-based environments. A significant majority of enterprise cloud infrastructure management decision makers report that it is very important to have management tools and capabilities that span across multiple cloud environments, including public, private, hosted and edge locations. The addition of automation functionalities helps further extend effective management across the hybrid cloud."

1. Source: Forrester Consulting, “The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020,” Chris Gardner with Glenn O'Donnell, Robert Perdoni and Diane Lynch, August 10, 2020

2. Source: Forrester Consulting, “The Forrester Wave™: Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Q3 2020,” Dave Bartoletti, Charlie Dai with Lauren Nelson, Duncan Dietz, Han Bao and Bill Nagel, September 15, 2020

3. Source: Gartner, “Market Guide for Container Management,” Dennis Smith, October 10, 2019