As the modern IT environment continues to evolve, it continues to grow in complexity. An organization’s technology stack may not look the same as it did five years ago, let alone five months ago. In addition, organizations are expected to scale faster than ever to meet customer demands in a digital world. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is our key for the enterprise to demystify complex systems and innovate at pace with the industry by breaking down bottlenecks caused by repetitive, manual processes. With the introduction of Ansible Automation Platform 2 announced today, IT teams can now take advantage of self-contained automation capabilities to make it even easier to address automation at scale across a range of environments and systems. 

Central to delivering and supporting portable IT automation is the Red Hat partner ecosystem. Three years ago, we launched the Red Hat Ansible Automation Certification Program to equip users with trusted and reliable automation content provided by Red Hat and our partners. Since then, Red Hat has introduced Ansible Content Collections to package certified Ansible content, such as modules, plugins, documentation and playbooks, making it even easier for users to manage, consume and deploy automation solutions. 

Today, we are proud to announce that there are nearly 100 supported partner platforms enabled by Ansible Content Collections, nearly double since this time last year. Red Hat’s growing catalog of ready-to-use, certified Ansible content is a testament to the power of automation and the real results seen by users.

The future of automation 

No matter what your technology stack looks like, there is probably an Ansible Content Collection or a certified Ansible partner to address the unique automation challenges and needs. Many organizations may start the automation process by automating one aspect of their operation, such as infrastructure, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. 

At Red Hat, we believe that end-to-end automation is the future of IT operations and management. In order to truly expand automation across domains, processes and geographies, organizations need a single, consistent and flexible solution like Ansible Automation Platform. Reusable content becomes crucial for reducing complexity and streamlining automation projects, but organizations need to be able to trust that content is supported and validated. 

By working with a certified Ansible partner, customers can be assured that Ansible integrations are fully supported by Red Hat and validated through the Ansible Certification Program. Access to certified Ansible Content Collections also means that organizations can easily gather and activate automation content to be used consistently across their IT footprint. Ansible Automation Platform has numerous network automation and security automation integrations, as well as support for multi vendor platforms. Among the most recent additions is a certified collection for ServiceNow that provides closed loop IT service management (ITSM) automation. You can learn more about these certified collections in the platform’s automation hub hosted service or in this article

Validated by developers, communities and industry experts 

Powered by our partners and contributors, Ansible Automation Platform is widely considered a de facto standard in IT automation by developers, the open source community and industry analysts.

Customers

As of May 2021, there are nearly 7 million active Ansible nodes under management for customers worldwide. Ansible Automation Platform is utilized by 100% of airlines, 82% of commercial banks and 65% of media and technology companies in the Fortune 500.

Developers 

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021 gathered feedback from more than 80,000 developers on which tools and platforms they prefer to use. This year, Ansible jumped up the list to rank #6 in most popular tools and #8 in most loved technology by developers.

Community

Ansible is among the top ten projects on GitHub, with more than 5,000 contributors and nearly 50,000 stars.

Industry Analysts 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was named among the leaders in The Forrester Wave™: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020. In addition, a recent IDC report sponsored by Red Hat revealed that customers using Ansible Automation Platform are projected to achieve an average five-year return on investment of 667 percent. Learn more about this study in this AnsibleFest session presented by IDC.  

Learn more

Join Red Hat and our partners at AnsibleFest 2021 to learn more about certified Ansible Content Collections and how to unlock the power of automation. Here are a few suggested sessions to get you started: 


About the author

Massimo Ferrari is Management Strategy Director at Red Hat, responsible for developing strategic product direction for Ansible Automation Platform as well as fostering its partner ecosystem.

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