Red Hat buys Ansible
Open source giant beefs up configuration management offering with multi-million dollar purchase of company behind popular project.
Red Hat this month signed a significant deal to acquire Ansible, the company behind the eponymous devops/ configuration management tool. This oft rumoured deal gives Red Hat a strong additional component in its hybrid management portfolio.
The company states that Ansible will be used to help customers: deploy and manage applications across the public and private cloud; speed up service delivery; streamline OpenStack installations and accelerate container adoption. The price for the deal is at the moment undisclosed, but some estimates put it as high as $100m. According to a Red Hat FAQ on the acquisition, there may be plans to open source all of Ansible’s software, including the previously subscription-only AnsibleTower product.
Aimed at the enterprise market, Ansible Tower provides a user interface for centrally executing and monitoring Ansible playbooks as well as handling role-based access and compliance reporting (the kind of thing which tick boxes for enterprise purchasers). Ansible will be given a push to compete with the larger Puppet and Chef.
Red Hat went into greater detail about the reasoning behind the purchase on their website ( http://www.redhat.com/en/ about/blog/why-red-hat-acquired-ansible). The plan will be to have CloudForms (the companies existing orchestration and policy tool) work as the top-level controller, with AnsibleTower handling the automated provisions requested through it. Red Hats’ Satellite product will continue to take care of the underlying OS provisioning and patching (it will still be possible to run Ansible standalone though). Red Hat pointed out Ansible’s ability to manage heterogeneous environments including Windows, network equipment and Amazon based cloud infrastructure.
On a less serious note, the popular game streaming community Twitch announced a follow up to the ‘Twitch Plays Pokemon’ project with something “much more challenging”: a crowd-controlled install of Arch Linux. Every five seconds, the most popular keystroke in the chatroom is entered into the console of the VM which is being streamed. Head over to www.twitch.tv/twitchinstallsarchlinux if you want to join in, though be aware the original was hijacked by a botnet hacker. Oh internet!