One U.S. city used Ansible Automation to provision resources for creation of a virtual emergency operations center when COVID-19 struck last year. In another state, an IT department employed the platform to speed delivery of digital services through 19 government agencies for residents.

Automation platforms, such as Red Hat Inc.’s Ansible, are increasingly being deployed for a wide range of applications, driven by an ability to replace manual tasks with faster, streamlined processes in the right place and at the right time.

“It’s situational automation that uses analytic models to make decisions without human help,” said Stephen Elliot, group vice president of I&O, cloud operations and DevOps at IDC Research, in an interview with theCUBE. “There are slices of it today, but that’s where we are headed over the next decade. Call it AIOps meets automation.” 

The future of AIOps and automation will be on display September 29-30 when Red Hat holds its free, virtual AnsibleFest 2021 event. Developers, administrators, IT decision makers and partners will share insights on open-source technologies and new ways to automate, innovate and accelerate. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, will provide coverage of the event beginning at 8 a.m. PDT on September 29 and concluding at 5 p.m. PDT on September 30. Red Hat’s livestream will include interviews with Walter Bentley, senior manager of the automation practice at Red Hat; Robyn Bergeron, senior manager of Ansible Automation at Red Hat; Joe Mills, director of strategy and transformation at Discover; and Devi Sankar, principal engineer at United Airlines. (* Disclosure below.)

Solutions in Denver and Michigan

The growth of situational automation is making an impact in a number of ways. The city of Denver, Colorado, needed to create a temporary operations center to facilitate emergency response when a global pandemic forced the closure of numerous civic services and agencies. With a digital solution being the only option, city officials were able to create an emergency operations center over the course of a weekend using Ansible and its automation capabilities.

“We can’t predict the future, but we know we will face challenges related to hiring and resource availability,” said Sean Greer, director of IT service delivery for the City and County of Denver, during an interview about the project. “Being able to automate processes will be fundamental to supporting new, digital ways of working to solve these challenges.”

In the state of Michigan, government officials needed to transform citizen-facing services and internal processes. The state’s Department of Technology leveraged Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible to begin using containerized solutions and automate workflows across multiple cloud deployments. The end result was a streamlining of back-office operations, which sped delivery of key constituent services.

Interoperable design

Ansible has been identified as one of the top preferred cloud management tools by IT professionals. The platform has proved to be especially attractive for organizations with a complex application landscape and busy DevOps workloads.

Part of Ansible’s appeal lies in its interoperability. It is designed to integrate with nearly every platform and tool, a consequence of its open-source architecture. Ansible will also work on all major operating systems, containers and clouds, and it enables a number of value-added features such as advanced security policies.

Is Ansible’s suite of services meeting an important need in the IT market?

“Yes, big time,” Elliott said. “It’s the opportunity for customers to adopt across teams and leverage the easy-to-use configuration language to across teams to accelerate DevOps, auto remediation and cross-team (and process) automation.”

Integration with IBM

Following the closure of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat in 2019 for $34 billion, it was expected that Ansible’s automation platform would play a greater role in the technology giant’s own portfolio of products.

One of the ways this has already played out can be seen in the updates of IBM’s Elastic Storage System earlier this year. The new ESS 3200 included capabilities for software upgrades that can be automated and configured using Ansible.

In addition, IBM referenced Ansible’s contribution to the firm’s critical hybrid cloud strategy when it unveiled its Power E1080 server earlier this month.

“Red Hat and IBM are at the forefront of hybrid cloud innovation,” said Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of Red Hat’s platforms business, at the time of the release. “To help clients adopt a frictionless hybrid cloud experience, we’re giving IBM Power users new ways to access Red Hat software to help them explore new avenues on their digital transformation, like Red Hat OpenShift containers, Red Hat Ansible, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and more.”

Livestream of AnsibleFest

AnsibleFest is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access Red Hat’s live event. Plus, you can watch theCUBE interviews here during the event, as well as on demand after the event.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of AnsibleFest, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube channel. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Guests

Guests who will be interviewed on theCUBE during AnsibleFest include Stephen Elliot, group vice president of management software and DevOps at IDC, as well as Red Hat’s Thomas Anderson, VP of product management; Richard Henshall, senior manager of product management; Carol Chen, principal community architect, Ansible; and Ashesh Badani, head of products.

TheCUBE will also speak with Red Hat’s Joe Fitzgerald, VP and general manager of the Management Business Unit, and Stefanie Chiras, senior VP of the Red Hat Platforms Business Group.

Stay tuned for a complete list of speakers.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE