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Red Hat Integrates Ansible Automation with OpenShift Kubernetes

• By John K. Waters
• October 14, 2020

Red Hat announced this week the upcoming technology preview of an integration of its Ansible automation solution with its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform to enable organizations and channel partners to more easily automate tasks among traditional on-prem and emerging cloud-native infrastructures.

With this integration, Red Hat aims to accelerate the automation and integration between cloud-native and traditional infrastructure. It 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, including Red Hat OpenShift," the company said in a statement.

The IBM subsidiary made the announcement at the AnsibleFest Virtual 2020 event, currently underway online. The integration will make it easier for partners to deliver complex, highly scalable hybrid cloud environments to their enterprise customers, the company said.

Red Hat describes the Ansible Automation Platform as a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation.

"By integrating Red Hat OpenShift with Ansible Automation Platform, enterprises can leverage Ansible for infrastructure management and application deployment," said Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat. "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."

The integration of the two technologies allows Red Hat leverage OpenShift's Kubernetes Operator foundation to further IT automation in hybrid cloud environments. A Kubernetes Operator is a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes app is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes API and kubectl tooling. 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, the company said.

"Interest in consistent cross-cloud management and visibility is rapidly increasing as enterprises move more workloads into hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure platforms," said IDC cloud management analyst Mary Johnston Turner, in a statement, "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.4 The addition of automation functionalities helps further extend effective management across the hybrid cloud."