Thursday, February 18, 2016

Red Hat's Ansible Brings DevOps to Networking

Red Hat introduced new Ansible capabilities, including native agentless support for automating heterogeneous network infrastructure devices using the same simple human and machine readable automation language that Ansible provides to IT teams.

At launch, Red Hat's Ansible networking framework provides support for:

  • Arista Networks – Arista EOS 
  • Cisco Systems – Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI); Cisco IOS-XE; Cisco IOS-XR; and Cisco NX-OS 
  • Cumulus Networks – Cumulus Linux; 
  • OpenSwitch.net – OpenSwitch; and 
  • Juniper Networks – Junos OS.
Red Hat said these expanded Ansible capabilities will help bring DevOps capabilities to networking. For network teams looking to apply more agile DevOps methodologies to network infrastructures, Ansible can enhance their ability to build and operate heterogeneous network devices, freeing them up to focus on evolving the network to meet the changing business needs instead of manually pushing network configuration. For systems and applications teams that wish to include network devices in a holistic approach to application workload management, Ansible’s native network device support enables them to extend their DevOps tools and practices to heterogeneous network devices.

"Today’s networks are complicated, and largely comprised of multi-vendor solutions, making them rather inflexible and slow to react to business changes. Bringing a DevOps mindset and approach to the network gives customers the ability to make network operations a repeatable, more predictable, and automated process. By bringing the power of Ansible, the popular open source IT automation solution, to the network, we’re giving customers the ability to solve their complicated networking automation and workflow problems in a new way,”

http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-brings-devops-network-new-ansible-capabilities

Red Hat to Acquire Ansible for DevOps Automation

Red Hat agreed to acquire Ansible, a developer of enterprise IT automation  solutions.  The companies did not disclose the acquisition price

Ansible’s agentless approach for IT automation, unlike competing solutions, does not require any special coding skills. Key marketing points for Ansible include:

  • Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds.
  • Speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives.
  • Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
  • Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.

Red Hat said Ansible's automation capabilities, together with its existing management portfolio, will help users drive down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud env ironments.