Red Hat Ansible All-Stars: Driving the future of network and infrastructure automation

As enterprise infrastructures scale across hybrid cloud environments and distributed networks, operations teams face an unsustainable calculation. Managing thousands of servers or multi-vendor routing, switching, and security endpoints manually creates an environment ripe for configuration drift, severe deployment bottlenecks, and late-night firefighting. Until recently, many organizations relied on custom scripting or localized, ad-hoc workflows to bridge these operational gaps. However, individual scripts lack centralized governance, fail to address the underlying skills shortage, and ultimately become a long-term maintenance headache.

To achieve true system reliability and scale, modern infrastructure leaders are realizing they must pivot from localized automation scripts to a standardized, enterprise-wide platform approach. They must build a unified automation stack equipped with reusable architectures, cross-vendor integration, and strict code-review pipelines.

This year, Red Hat recognized 3 outstanding IT professionals as our 2026 Red Hat Ansible All-Star Award recipients for leading exactly this brand of structural and cultural modernization. We sat down with 2 of the winners—Drew McKee, system administrator at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas, and Jade Wu, network automation engineer at TD Bank Group—to look past the high-level strategy and analyze the exact engineering blueprints they used to transform complex, legacy environments into resilient, automated platform ecosystems.

Fostering cultural transformation and code standardization through a community of practice with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

At Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas (BCBS of Kansas), system administrator Drew McKee faced a common hurdle: expanding the footprint of IT tasks that traditionally are time consuming due to manual processes and lack centralized governance. 

Recognizing the need for a more scalable architecture, Drew began to build out automation workflows using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. He strategically focused on integrating Ansible Automation Platform into the core tech stack which helped BCBS of Kansas achieve measurable efficiencies and impacts via the automation of patching workflows, end-to-end certificate management, and centralized ticket management, to name a few.

Going beyond just a technology transformation, Drew championed the beginning of a cultural transformation. To break down traditional silos, encourage cross-departmental collaboration, and spark innovation, Drew started a weekly internal community of practice. This community became a forum for Drew and his peers to: 

• Collaborate and share: Swap innovative playbook ideas and real-world use cases.
• Standardize: Define unified organizational standards for documentation, naming conventions, and GitLab production merge workflows.
• Empower: Capitalize on early wins to encourage organizational adoption, while providing developers with self-service automation templates.

Drew’s commitment to innovation extends into the future; he is currently guiding his team toward a new era of AI and intelligent IT. We look forward to seeing Drew continue his work in advancing organizational maturity, efficiency, and scale.

Compressing complex network migration timelines from years to months

At TD Bank Group, network automation engineer Jade Wu faced a challenge: managing an increasingly complex, borderless infrastructure spanning thousands of branches and tens of thousands of devices. Moving into the network automation group, Jade stepped in to execute her leadership's vision that modern network scale required absolute automation.

To do so, Jade turned to Ansible Automation Platform to address the diversity of TD's network hardware—which spans routing, switching, wireless, SD-WAN, firewalls, and load balancers across multiple vendors. Ansible Automation Platform came out on top because it has all the features they need. The team was looking for a platform that could support cross-platform vendor collections without requiring intrusive software deployments. It had to be agentless, because they don't want to install agents on every single network device.

To maintain strict governance, Jade's team architected a unique environment, running a dedicated Ansible Automation Platform exclusively for network services—completely separate from the platforms handling server management and enterprise-wide automation.

Her strategic choices paid off during an IP address migration project:

• Compressing timelines: Faced with a migration spanning 1,300 branches and 25,000 devices, traditional manual estimates projected a multi-year timeline. Jade and her team delivered it in just 4 months—with only 4 weeks spent writing code.
• Zero prep time: Previously, engineers needed 5 hours per site just to analyze and prepare for a change window. Jade and her team's automated framework eliminated that completely by performing real-time pre-validation against live device data and the organization's source of truth.
• Massive concurrency: While a highly capable human engineer could manually migrate a maximum of 3 sites per night, engineers were able to use Jade and her team’s automation to safely scale. 
• Eliminating the night shift: By deliberately reframing automation to eliminate tedious, late-night execution work rather than engineering roles, Jade and her team’s work won over skeptics. Going hands-off at night dramatically improved her team's quality of life. Today, her colleagues proactively approach the team to request automation on their own projects.

The next frontier of enterprise automation

Drew and his team are laying the groundwork for a new era of intelligent IT, with plans to explore self-healing infrastructure and AIOps, areas that promise to take efficiency and scale to the next level. Meanwhile, Jade is expanding her platform's capabilities with a focus on proactive incident response and self-service portals that make automation more accessible to stakeholders across the organization. Their work reflects a broader shift happening across the industry, and innovators like Drew and Jade are proof that the next frontier of automation isn't just on the horizon, it's already being built. 

To hear more about where enterprise automation is headed, check out this panel discussion from Red Hat Summit featuring Red Hat’s Michele Kelley and other industry leaders. Drew and Jade represent the very best of the automation community, demonstrating how individual passion, ingenuity, and dedication can overcome organizational inertia, transform culture, and lay the blueprint for the future of enterprise IT.

Additional resources

• Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customer stories
• Explore the feature and benefits of Ansible Automation Platform
• Read our beginners guide to automation
• Start your free trial

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas is an independent licensee of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association.