Best of Fest 2022

At AnsibleFest 2022, the power of automation was on full display. Through sessions, workshops, labs and more, we explored how to transform enterprise and industry through automation. There were a lot of exciting announcements made on both days, and in case you missed it, we are going to dive into what is new!

Ansible and AWS

We are thrilled to also announce a new AWS Marketplace offering, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. By offering Ansible Automation Platform as a pre-integrated service that can be quickly deployed from cloud marketplaces, we are meeting our customers where they are, while giving them the flexibility to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity. Whether you are automating your hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environments, Ansible Automation Platform acts as a single platform. This platform provides consistency, visibility, and control to help you manage these environments at scale. Ansible is the IT automation "glue" for bringing your cloud, network, bare-metal and cloud-native infrastructure together. This provides the functionality to coordinate and manage across hybrid cloud environments in a simple and efficient way. Interested in learning more? Check out the press release.

Automation at the Edge

Ansible Automation Platform provides a framework for building and operating IT automation at scale. What this means for edge, much like the data center, is that users across an entire organization can create, share, and manage automation. They can develop and apply guidelines for using automation within individual groups. They can write tasks that use existing knowledge so they can be leveraged by nonIT staff, allowing end-to-end automation to be deployed. Ansible Automation Platform uses containerization to package, distribute, and execute automation across environments securely via automation execution environments. This enables organizations to rapidly and consistently extend IT services to the edge, while maintaining a focus on security. This helps organizations to simplify capacity scaling, increase resiliency, and improve consistency. Learn more about automation at the edge here.

Event-Driven Ansible

Event-Driven Ansible is a new capability that we're making available to the entire Ansible open source community in developer preview. With Event-Driven Ansible, you can eliminate low-level tasks from the day-to-day routine so you have more time to focus on innovations. This means a happier, more productive, and more engaged team. It is fast, accurate, and will free you (and your teams) to work on the things you WANT to be doing, without being dragged down by all the things you HAVE to do. Event--Driven Ansible will support a range of use cases, and here are few good ones to get started with:

Automating remediation of common problems, like resetting a network router that's out.
Gathering information to solve problems faster, like information about a server configuration or buffer pool size so when you get the service ticket, the information you need is already there.
Administering user requests ... like "I can't log in" or "I cannot access the application".

We are excited about the future of automation and what is possible with Event-Driven Ansible.

Project Wisdom

Project Wisdom is a Red Hat initiative, developed in close collaboration with IBM Research, to give Ansible artificial intelligence superpowers. The first goal is to bring together automation novices and Ansible experts while enabling new automators to drastically reduce the challenge of learning and mastering Ansible. The first capability we are using AI for is content generation. The AI models we use underneath Project Wisdom are able to generate Ansible Playbooks or roles that are both syntactically correct and functional. You can also head to redhat.com/wisdom for more information on how to get involved.

Ansible Automation Platform 2

Ansible Automation Platform 2 is built to enable a trusted automation supply chain. In the upcoming Ansible Automation Platform 2.3 release, digital signing will be supported for containers, playbooks and collections. We're also excited to introduce Ansible validated content, which complements the existing ecosystem of Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections. Ansible validated content helps your teams to start automating faster by following a trusted, expert-led, opinionated path for performing operations and tasks on both Red Hat and third party platforms. Initially, Ansible validated content will be pre-loaded into private automation hub.

Community

We are so fortunate that we are a part of one of the largest, most vibrant open source project communities in the world. So while the landscape may be shifting around us, Ansible continues to push forward and evolve with the times. Ansible is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! Within our expansive community, the new Working Groups focus on expanding the Ansible ecosystem with the development of Ansible Content Collections. First spun up by our team last year, Matrix has made a huge difference in our ability to connect and engage with the Ansible community. So far we've spun up 32 unique chat rooms, with 4200+ members and nearly 80k messages sent in the past 6 months. Matrix's ability to bridge with IRC gave us a strong foundation upon which to build. Join the Working Groups and become a part of the conversation: https://matrix.to/#/#social:ansible.com