Automate everything, adapt to anything: Red Hat's vision for the next era of IT operations

Automation is crucial for organizations tackling today's complex IT environment. Over 4,000 customers rely on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to overcome skills shortages, simplify IT operations across their businesses and consolidate their toolsets. While many organizations are successfully tackling these challenges, they continue to face the added pressure of harnessing the transformative potential of AI and what to do about modernizing virtualization.

Red Hat’s goal with Ansible Automation Platform is to enable customers to achieve their strategic business objectives, and automation adoption is key to that success. Automation is fundamental for linking systems, enabling robust ongoing operations and maintaining compliance and security within intricate IT landscapes. Given the numerous tasks and limited resources, automation's value becomes clear. The challenge, and opportunity, for every IT organization will be to harness AI to deliver on its promise, while at the same time modernizing their stacks.

Our vision is for Ansible Automation Platform to be the strategic solution with which automators can drive the transformation that businesses will need to compete and win in this new era. To accomplish this, we are focused on five key areas:

• Unlocking AI value in IT operations
• Making the modernization of virtualization easier
• Infusing the platform with AI and simplifying the user experience
• Expanding how teams can demonstrate automation’s impact on the business
• Driving continuous innovation in infrastructure automation and lifecycle management

AI, virtualization and Ansible Automation Platform

Ansible Automation Platform unlocks the value of AI in IT operations by making it possible to take advantage of AI offered in the tools you use and automate today. In the era of AI, every vendor is embedding generative (gen AI) and predictive AI capabilities into their offerings. What organizations are looking to do is take action on intelligence, and without the interconnected systems, this becomes difficult. With Event-Driven Ansible, Ansible Automation Platform makes AI-driven intelligence actionable at scale. However, giving power to AI insights comes with its own dilemmas. Who is supervising these AI agents? This is where Ansible Automation Platform’s policy enforcement helps maintain governance over AI in your workflows. You can keep control of AI-driven automation before it reaches completion. Policy enforcement enhances the compliance, auditability and overall value of AI adding more confidence that event-driven responses align with company policies. 

While AI is clearly a major strategic priority, it is important to remember it is not the only one. The last few years have resulted in many customers reconsidering their virtualization strategy. Ansible Automation Platform offers a flexible, scalable and efficient solution for migrating virtualization infrastructure. The readily available Red Hat Ansible Certified Collections for both Windows and Linux simplify Day 2 operations regardless of the hypervisor, bringing consistent lifecycle management across the hybrid cloud. 

More AI comes to Ansible Automation Platform

We are committed to continuously enhancing the platform, and this commitment extends to helping our customers unlock AI value. This includes further solidifying the critical link between AI initiatives and IT automation, and providing comprehensive support for leveraging AI features within their existing technology landscape. Additionally, recognizing automation’s powerful potential, Red Hat is focused on making automation accessible to a wider audience, empowering subject matter experts to become skilled automators. This initiative began with Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed with IBM Watson Code Assistant and continues with the development of an Ansible Lightspeed intelligent assistant (in technology preview) that integrates AI directly into day-to-day automation activities. 

Continued enhancements

Red Hat's continuous investment in simplifying automation focuses on a frictionless experience for new users, seamless upgrades, effortless scaling and clear, demonstrable value. 

To get started, we plan to provide more opinionated automation and an easy-to-use getting started experience for individuals with limited experience in writing Ansible Playbooks. Making this experience possible is the continued expansion and improvements to collections, both Red Hat Ansible Certified and validated ones. A library of accessible automation enables efficient, effective and collaborative automation empowering both subject matter experts and new users to become automators no matter the IT team they are a part of. These enhancements can help address the skills gap and resource constraints in enterprise IT by not requiring deep automation expertise. These added enhancements will enable Ansible administrators to empower more users to leverage the power of automation in a seamless way.

Automation is synonymous with efficiency and productivity. But when investing in an automation platform, a fundamental question has remained for both new and seasoned automators: How can we see the results, and value, that we achieve with automation? To aid this and help encourage more automation, we are also developing an on-premise automation dashboard ​t​o showcase the​ time and cost​ savings​ to stakeholders. The dashboard will show a view of automation from an organizational level, all the way down to the Ansible Playbook level. Further, these dashboards can be customized with your own metrics and cost structures, making it more accurate for your use cases and environments.

In addition to the enhanced Ansible Automation Platform experience, we have increased our release cadence to ensure faster implementation of customer feedback for new features. Our commitment is to continuously deliver new capabilities and valuable integrations with a laser focus on accelerating automation adoption for tangible use cases. In addition, our rapid releases come with curated, practical examples, directly enabling you to realize the benefits of new features. 

What’s next? 

Looking ahead, Red Hat is working to further innovate and simplify automation adoption in IT operations. We are actively forging a more unified and holistic future for infrastructure automation and lifecycle management. A key element of this goal is the partnership and integrations between Ansible Automation Platform and HashiCorp Terraform. Our product teams are dedicated to developing jointly supported collections and providers, offering customers a rich library of curated, opinionated content to accelerate holistic automation.

Our customers' success is the driving force behind every decision we make for Ansible Automation Platform. We are dedicated to empowering you to not only navigate the complexities of the evolving technology landscape, but to emerge as leaders. Stay tuned for more Ansible Automation Platform updates throughout the year, and see how our customers are already leveraging the power of automation to spearhead innovation.