For AWS re:Invent, Red Hat has introduced Ansible as a managed service on AWS Marketplace, allowing users to easily run Ansible automation on the Amazon Web Services cloud, with Red Hat managing the infrastructure.
Organizations can use the service to automate infrastructure actions by way of Ansible playbooks across their virtual private cloud (VPC), controlling a mixture of public and private cloud resources.
Tasks like operating system patching, network automation, security assurance, and application delivery can be streamlined with Ansible.
In fact, the number of uses is quite large that it now makes sense to procure it as a service, noted Sathish Balakrishnan is the Red Hat vice president and general manager of its Ansible business unit.
Typically, Red Hat Ansible is managed by the users themselves, but this can create some friction.
“So let’s say Network Automation guy wants to run Ansible, he has to wait for somebody in the infrastructure team to give us give him access to compute. Then he needs somebody else to basically install Ansible, and then he can actually get started, Balakrishnan told TNS in an interview. With the managed service, “somebody can just come into our cloud service and with three clicks actually get started on Ansible automation platform on AWS, and start networking.”
Costs incurred for using the Ansible depend on the number of modes being managed. It is similar to using the paid version of the product now. Currently, Ansible has about 5,000 paying customers and, likely, hundreds of thousands of users of the open source upstream version, Balakrishnan said.
AWS-Ansible Integration
The service has been live for two weeks, and Red Hat is formally announcing it at the AWS Re:Invent, being held this week in Las Vegas.
The Marketplace Ansible will also help Red Hat users on AWS better integrate their AWS services into Ansible workflows. Mapfre Insurance, for instance, is a big user of Ansible and a number of AWS native services, such as Lambda and Step Functions.
“So combining the two gives us the flexibility to cover a huge spectrum of automation organization processes,” asserted Mat Jovanovic, Mapfre corporate cloud strategy director.
Importance of IT Automation
Ansible and other workflow automation tools are important in that they are “about supporting the shift in provisioning services for enterprises from a “parts-centric approach” that focuses on technologies and individual capabilities to a “system-centric approach” that requires holistic management and governance in orchestrating all IT and cloud services to help enterprises achieve critical business and IT objectives,” wrote David Tapper, IDC program vice president outsourcing and managed cloud services, in a statement.
In its Q4 2024 report, Forrester Research highlighted Red Hat Ansible as the sole market leader in the space for infrastructure automation platforms, beating out other offerings from BMC Software, Canonical, Broadcom, Microsoft, OpenText and others.
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For AWS re:Invent, Red Hat has introduced Ansible as a managed service on AWS Marketplace.