Source: ZDNet (September 2017)
Red Hat Doubles Down on Ansible Automation
When Red Hat acquired Ansible, the bet was straightforward: combine Ansible’s agentless automation capabilities with Red Hat’s enterprise cloud and management portfolio to deliver a platform capable of driving automation across an entire organization—from IT operations and application development to network administration. That investment has continued to pay off, and in September 2017 Red Hat announced three significant additions to its Ansible product line.
What Was Announced
- Red Hat Ansible Engine — A new enterprise support offering wrapping the upstream Ansible community project with Red Hat-grade stability, security, and SLA-backed support.
- Red Hat Ansible Engine Networking Add-On — Full engineering support for a curated set of networking platform modules.
- Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2 — The latest release of Red Hat’s enterprise Ansible automation management platform, built on the open-source AWX project.
Red Hat Ansible Engine: Enterprise Support for Open-Source Automation
The upstream Ansible community moves fast—new modules, plugins, and features ship frequently. That velocity is valuable for experimentation, but many enterprises require a more predictable, stable, and fully supported foundation before they can deploy automation against mission-critical workloads. Ansible Engine was designed to close that gap.
Joe Fitzgerald, Red Hat’s VP of Management, explained the rationale: “Enterprise customers are interested in more stable and reliable automation technologies in order to be able to adopt these powerful capabilities enterprise-wide. Additionally, as more automation implementations directly impact mission-critical business applications and environments, the requirements for greater security, support and stability become even more important.”
Key features of Red Hat Ansible Engine include:
- A hardened, enterprise-ready set of Ansible automation modules and capabilities drawn from the upstream project.
- Business-hours or 24×7 support from Red Hat’s global support organization.
- Full Red Hat subscription benefits: Open Source Assurance, SLA-backed response times, and regular security and maintenance updates.
Ansible Engine Networking Add-On: Bringing Automation to the Network Layer
Network automation has historically lagged behind server and application automation. The Ansible Engine Networking Add-On addresses this by providing fully supported Ansible modules—developed and maintained in-house by Red Hat—for several widely deployed network operating systems. At announcement, the supported platforms included:
- Arista EOS
- Cisco IOS, IOS-XR, and NX-OS
- Juniper Junos OS
- Open vSwitch
- VyOS
This offering followed Red Hat’s earlier Ansible 2.3 release, which introduced initial network automation capabilities. The Networking Add-On gave those capabilities an enterprise support wrapper, making it practical for network operations teams to adopt Ansible automation with the same confidence level as server automation.
Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.2: Enterprise Management Built on AWX
Ansible Tower is Red Hat’s enterprise UI and API layer for managing Ansible automation at scale. Tower 3.2 is based on AWX, the open-source upstream project that represents the Tower source code. Red Hat’s approach with Tower mirrors how it handles other enterprise products: AWX moves quickly as a community project, while Tower takes selected AWX releases, hardens them for long-term supportability, and delivers them with full enterprise support.
Improved Global Management
- Custom inventory views: Updated inventory support lets users create custom views to manage machines based on their attributes across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.
- Tower Instance Groups: Dedicate capacity to specific organizations or inventory groups, enabling better multi-tenant resource control.
- Isolated Nodes: Allow local job execution in remote or air-gapped locations, reducing dependency on centralized Tower connectivity.
More Flexible Automation
- SCM Inventory Support: Source Control Management (SCM)-backed inventory allows teams to manage their automation and infrastructure fully as code, with inventory definitions stored and versioned in a source control repository.
- Pluggable Credentials: Users can define custom credential types, enabling integration with third-party credential stores and secrets management systems beyond Tower’s built-in options.
Availability and Licensing
At the time of announcement, the planned availability was as follows:
- Ansible Tower 3.2: Available later in September 2017 via ansible.com and the Red Hat Customer Portal.
- Ansible Engine and Ansible Engine for Network Automation: Targeted for availability by early October 2017, either as a standalone subscription or bundled with an Ansible Tower subscription.
Existing Ansible Tower customers could add an Ansible Engine subscription at any time to gain supported access to the underlying Ansible automation engine that powers Tower.
Why This Matters for DevOps Teams
These announcements reflected a broader industry pattern: open-source automation tools gaining adoption in enterprise environments require a clear commercial support path before they can expand beyond pilot projects. By introducing Ansible Engine, Red Hat gave organizations a supported, stable foundation to deploy Ansible automation against production workloads without relying solely on community releases. Combined with Tower 3.2’s improved multi-site and multi-tenant capabilities, the Ansible portfolio became a more credible option for large organizations looking to standardize automation across infrastructure, application delivery, and network operations teams.