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Tag: ansible

  • Red Hat Previews Series of Updates to Ansible Automation Platform

    Red Hat Previews Series of Updates to Ansible Automation Platform

    Red Hat today at AnsibleFest 2025 previewed support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP) developed by Anthropic within Ansible Lightspeed, a set of generative artificial intelligence capabilities based on large language models (LLMs) specifically trained by Red Hat and IBM to automate IT tasks.

    Any LLM or associated AI agent will soon be able to invoke AAP to execute a playbook. Additionally, IT teams can make use of Ansible policy enforcement based on Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework to establish guardrails for any AI agent or LLM accessing MCP.

    Red Hat also previewed a customizable dashboard for the Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) that makes it simpler to surface the economic value created by an automated workflow. IT teams will be able to ascribe a value to an automation that will then generate a dashboard showing its value based on how often it runs. That dashboard can then be saved as a PDF file or embedded directly into a spreadsheet application that can be shared with finance teams to help evaluate the return on investment in automation.

    Finally, Red Hat and HashiCorp previewed additional integrations planned with the Terraform infrastructure-as-code platform following the acquisition of HashiCorp by IBM, the parent company of Red Hat.

    Sathish Balakrishnan, VP and general manager of the Ansible business unit within Red Hat, told conference attendees there will soon be more out-of-the-box integrations to enable automated workflows that include Terraform IaC tools that are widely used to provision IT environments. The two platforms together provide a highly complementary set of capabilities for automating IT workflows on a more end-to-end basis, he added.

    HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar, meanwhile, added there will soon be more Terraform hooks into AAP to provide deeper integrations into production environments.

    It’s not clear how many DevOps teams are looking to integrate Terraform with Ansible, but the opportunity to automate IT processes more fully presents an opportunity to streamline workflows. The challenge, as always, is aligning what are often different teams within the same organization.

    Regardless of the approach, it’s clear that as more workflows are automated, the overall level of toil experienced by IT professionals should sharply decline in the months ahead—especially as AI models are more broadly applied—even as the number of applications deployed in production environments continues to exponentially increase.

    It’s not likely those AI models and agents will replace the need for DevOps engineers and IT administrators any time soon. However, the nature of those roles is likely to profoundly change as more tasks are assigned to AI agents that are supervised by an IT team.

    In the meantime, those IT teams would be well-advised to start identifying which manual tasks being performed today might soon be automated using a combination of Terraform tools and AAP that share access to the same core AI model and agent technologies. Truth be told, chances are high the bulk of that list will be made up of tasks that no one really enjoyed doing in the first place.

  • Red Hat Adds Generative AI and Event-Driven Capabilities to Ansible

    Red Hat Adds Generative AI and Event-Driven Capabilities to Ansible

    Red Hat today unveiled a technical preview of Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) service specifically trained on domain-specific data collected via the Ansible automation platform.

    At the same time, Red Hat is also making available an event-driven capability within version 2.4 of the Ansible platform that enables runbooks and other tasks to automatically execute when received from a third-party tool or application.

    Both capabilities were announced at the Red Hat Summit and are part of an ongoing Red Hat effort to democratize IT automation.

    First previewed within the Project Wisdom initiative launched by Red Hat and IBM Research last year, Ansible Lightspeed IBM Watson Code Assistant is based on a large language model (LLM) that was developed using Ansible data. Watson Code Assistant, currently in technical preview, is a service that automatically generates suggestions to improve code as developers create an application. IBM promised to make IBM Watson Code Assistant available later this year.

    Red Hat is now applying that generative AI capability to the YAML code that DevOps teams need to create Ansible playbooks. IT teams can create a simple natural language prompt that will translate their domain expertise into YAML code for creating or editing Ansible Playbooks. Red Hat and IBM, however, will not automatically use the code from an organization to fine-tune their AI model without express consent.

    Rich Henshall, director of product management for Red Hat Ansible, said as IT environments become more complex, it’s clear many are hitting a ceiling in terms of what can be automated using legacy custom scripts. Ansible Lightspeed IBM Watson Code Assistant, along with an event-driven capability, will make it much simpler to automate the management of IT environments at scale using a declarative framework, he added.

    Ansible, for example, can now receive events from third-party tools, determine next steps and consistently initiate an automated response using Ansible playbooks. Ansible can also consume events from third-party monitoring, observability and IT analytics tools from providers such as Cisco ThousandEyes, CyberArk, Dynatrace, F5, IBM Instana, IBM Turbonomic, Palo Alto Networks and Zabbix with more to come, noted Henshall. Red Hat is also making available supplementary content for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Insights, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and ServiceNow, in addition to enabling IT teams to create their own custom integrations.

    At this juncture, it’s not clear why more IT processes have not been automated using Ansible or other frameworks. Many DevOps teams continue to rely on custom scripts that typically don’t scale and are generally poorly documented. Any time the individual who wrote those scripts leaves an organization, it’s incredibly difficult—if not impossible—for the original scripts to be maintained, noted Henshall.

    One way or another, it’s clear that a more scalable approach to IT automation is required, especially with the rise of more complex cloud-native application environments. It’s no longer economically viable for most organizations to rely on legacy processes that require a small army of IT professionals to maintain.

  • Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Two: Skills Are Less Relevant

    Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Two: Skills Are Less Relevant

    This is perhaps the toughest issue for all of us to acknowledge: The longer you are in the space, the more skills you have filled out on LinkedIn (or wherever you are tracking your career for HR reps to look at) but the skills you possess today are, by definition, a subset of the skills you will possess even a couple of months from now if you change roles. Note that I said “change roles,” not “change employers.” The fact is that we use an insane number of tools in the development, DevOps and operations environments, and we’re addicted to adding new ones (that might be a hint about part three of this series). Changing roles within a company can involve minor changes, or it can take you to a whole new environment where no one cares that you are a Java genius; they want to know how fast you can pick up Python and be truly productive. Or they nod at your talk of configuring servers and ask if you can do that with Ansible on containers. It’s just not as important anymore for most employees to have a specific skillset. That’s a major contributor to the problems I talked about in part one.

    Of course, there are roles in IT that involve far less change. Email administration, for example, isn’t all that different from the way it has been since, well, forever. We have changed how/where the server is configured and many orgs have added SSO or multifactor authentication, creating new issues, but it’s all evolutionary. When NoSQL systems came out, it looked like a major change in DBA work, but it really wasn’t. Within a year, reality put SQL over top of NoSQL stores and DBAs kept chugging along.

    But DevOps has impacted both development and operations in profound ways. We pretty much standardized on Java, with all of its warts, because it was object oriented, general purpose and could be compiled if needed. Though embedded largely stayed with C, there was no serious competition in the enterprise for Java and Java-like (.NET) languages. Knowing them meant you could do everything but real-time/embedded development jobs—and even some embedded work shifted to Java as prices for miniaturized compute power dropped.

    But that changed. The inflection point was JavaScript, and from there, we went a little bit crazy. When JavaScript took off, full-stack developers needed to know one front-end and a couple of backend languages. Other languages still existed—the staying power of both Perl and PHP is somewhat surprising to me; they’re both good languages but have limitations. But still, no serious competition. But Node.js took JavaScript to the server, Ruby was popular for backends, Python came along for quick scripting … And now we have apps written in those and a dozen more languages floating around.

    I chose languages to fit the whole story into a blog because they see less change than the operations side, where we’ve gone from annual big releases to rolling deployments updated frequently and all the support tools changed in the process. Infrastructure has changed, data stores have changed, mobility has changed, UI targets have changed—basically, it’s a chaotic mess.

    And you’re in the heart of it, keeping the data flowing and the org running. It’s astounding, and you deserve more kudos than you’re likely getting. So approach hiring differently. Some orgs are already there, but skill-based hiring is still too prevalent. Hire broad technical knowledge and a desire to know more. As someone I know honestly said in a job interview once, “No, I never used it, but it is just another programming language. I’ll be productive in a week.” She got the job and delivered as promised. For all but those few corner-case roles, hire for potential and achievements and skills will follow.

  • Red Hat Brings Ansible Automation to Google Cloud

    Red Hat Brings Ansible Automation to Google Cloud

    Red Hat today announced that the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is now available on Google Cloud to simplify the management of yet another cloud platform.

    Using the Ansible Automation Platform, it’s now possible for IT teams that invoke Google Cloud to access pre-integrated services such as Google Virtual Private Cloud, security groups, load balancers and compute and instance groups.

    Pete Cruz, head of product and technical marketing for Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Red Hat, said Google Cloud—alongside existing support for rival cloud services—will make it simpler to consistently apply automation across multiple cloud and on-premises IT environments.

    In addition, IT teams can also count the consumption of the Ansible Automation Platform toward any existing enterprise spend agreements with Google.

    Ansible has emerged as a de facto standard for IT automation and is widely embraced by IT vendors and cloud service providers. That level of support has fostered the creation of a level of automation content that is now unrivaled by any other automation framework, noted Cruz.

    In the meantime, the pressure to automate IT processes is building during uncertain economic times. As IT environments continue to become more complex—thanks, in part, to the rise of cloud-native applications—many IT organizations are finding it more challenging to convince business executives to hire additional full-time employees. As a result, many of those IT organizations are now looking to automate as many processes as possible as more workloads are distributed from the network edge to the cloud.

    Rather than create a single playbook to automate every IT process on an end-to-end basis, organizations generally mix-and-match content created by others to automate workflows across highly distributed computing environments, noted Cruz.

    The biggest challenge when automating IT processes is simply overcoming inertia. Many processes are still manual simply because they always have been. In other cases, IT teams are still relying on undocumented scripts created by IT administrators who have left the organization. As the IT environment continues to evolve, it’s not likely those scripts will continue to scale.

    One way or another, IT is becoming more automated. The irony is that after using IT to automate almost every business process imaginable, it’s only recently that IT teams are getting around to automating their own workflows. Many of the rote tasks that used to be performed by entry-level personnel have been steadily disappearing thanks to automation.

    DevOps teams, of course, have always been ruthlessly committed to automating as many IT processes as possible in the name of efficiency. The rise of Ansible, however, makes it easier for every IT organization to achieve that same goal because they don’t have to wait for a specialist to create a playbook to automate a process. An Ansible playbook that can be easily customized or extended often already exists. The real issue may simply be knowing where to look for it.

  • Red Hat and IBM Pledge to Bring NLP to Ansible

    Red Hat and IBM Pledge to Bring NLP to Ansible

    At the Ansiblefest 2022 conference today, Red Hat and its parent company IBM announced the Project Wisdom initiative to bring natural language processing (NLP) to the open source Ansible IT operations automation platform.

    At the same time, Red Hat announced that the curated instances of Ansible from Red Hat are now available in the marketplaces operated by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

    Richard Henshall, senior manager of Ansible product management at Red Hat, said the goal is to make IT automation much more accessible to a broader range of end users and IT professionals that lack the declarative programming expertise to use YAML files to automate IT processes. Instead, Red Hat and IBM Research teams are pledging to combine their expertise to create an artificial intelligence (AI) model that would enable anyone to use natural language to automate an IT process.

    Ansible has emerged as the de facto open source standard for automating a wide range of IT processes, but the number of processes that could be automated still far exceeds the number of IT processes that are currently automated. In recent years, IT automation tools have become more accessible thanks in part to the rise of low-code and no-code tools, but some level of programming expertise is still required. Project Wisdom is being launched to eliminate the need to acquire those skills before being able to automate a process.

    Of course, there will still be complex processes that may require the ability to programmatically manipulate YAML files, but the number of trivial IT processes that could be automated is still incalculable. In theory, a natural language interface for Ansible would greatly reduce the time and effort required for anyone to automate an IT process regardless of their skill level.

    Interest in IT automation is rising once again as the global economy continues to soften. Organizations are looking to automate as many processes as possible in their efforts to keep IT staff size as small as possible. The more time IT teams spend on manual processes the less they will be able to manage IT environments that get more complex with each passing day.

    It’s not clear to what degree IT processes can be automated, but as businesses become more dependent on IT, the line between IT automation and business processes continues to blur. Natural language processing capabilities could make it simpler for organizations to greatly accelerate digital business transformation initiatives.

    Regardless of the level of IT automation achieved, it’s clear the way IT is managed is about to evolve once again. The days when IT teams configured and provisioned IT resources using fragile custom scripts are coming to an end as platforms like Ansible are more widely adopted. The only issue that remains to be seen is how quickly IT processes can be automated and whether the rate of automation can keep up with the volume of applications currently being developed.