Red Hat buys Ansible for DevOps loveliness

Red Hat’s acquisition of Ansible is the company’s signal of how it hopes to expand further into OpenStack itself, as part of its wider ambitions in hybrid cloud management, OpenStack and containers. Pioneered by web giants like Google, Twitter, and Facebook, the model is gaining a growing foothold in the more traditional enterprise space, where companies like banks and manufacturers are now looking at software development as a way to differentiate and add new sources of revenue.

CloudForms is mainly aimed at policy, orchestration, and governance of hybrid clouds, not automation; Satellite is for maintaining Red Hat servers and has already been integrated with a competing automation system, Puppet.

“Users love the fact that system administrators and developers can learn Ansible quickly and use it for everything from application deployment to configuration management to orchestration of multi-tier services across private and public clouds”, wrote Red Hat in a FAQ about the deal. “We now use Puppet in Red Hat Satellite and have no plans to change that, as it suits the needs of customers quite well”, Joe Fitzgerald, vice president of management at Red Hat, told eWEEK. Terms were not disclosed, but at least one report suggests a purchase price above $100 million. That kind of popular upswell has pushed Ansible into 500 enterprises around the world, including a few customers in the Fortune 50, according to Red Hat’s FAQ.

Lenovo has announced that a new collection of ISV enterprise and SMB-oriented offering will be appearing on its hardware, including Red Hat OpenStack and VMware Software Defined Data Center.

There is an active open source community with almost 1,200 contributors mucking in at the upstream Ansible project on GitHub. However, Red Hat said in its press release that it expects its operating expense for fiscal 2016 to increase by $5 million in the third quarter and $6 million in the fourth quarter.

The addition of Ansible to Red Hat’s portfolio puts it at the forefront of cloud and DevOps, according to venture capitalist Doug Carlisle, MD of Menlo Ventures.

Of the other major devops automation frameworks out there, Ansible most closely resembles Salt/SaltStack, except that Salt requires agents on remote hosts, while Ansible uses an agentless architecture.