Said Ziouani
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Said Ziouani
Red Hat acquires Ansible, the open source IT automation company.
The title should come as no surprise, as many have predicted such an acquisition in the past. The similar open source ideologies, the technology fit, the executive team's open source background and the rapid adoption of Ansible in the enterprise certainly draw parallels to the world's leader in open source technology. What was once a prediction is now reality, in just a little more than two years since Ansible, Inc., opened its doors, and we are thrilled!
Ansible made its name in IT automation, and our agile, simple and agentless model allowed us to reach beyond just configuration management and into application deployment and multitier orchestration. This helped to establish a strong lead in DevOps with CI/CD, while latching on to fast growing areas such as cloud, network and container management. Our open source project boomed, becoming one of the most successful projects on GitHub (#1 follower presence in IT automation) with more than 1,200 contributors. Ultimately, this success led to the Ansible project being named as one of 2014's top 10 open source projects, and a place in Gartner's ‘Cool DevOps Vendor’ report in 2015.
Our customer adoption has also rapidly grown since inception, with more than Continue reading
Ansible Simplicity Keeps Shining
When Ansible was first founded three years ago, the underlying premise was to simplify some of the complexity in the existing DevOps tools. The mere idea of needing a strong developer toolset to automate your IT infrastructure was an overwhelming concept for most. I believe this is one of the underlying reasons that the majority of the IT shops are still using home-crafted scripts to automate updates to their infrastructure and shying away from having to add more complexity to an already complex world.
The well known quote from, Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer, saying: “Less but Better”, has become somewhat of a guiding principle for Ansible. Being able to achieve in few lines of YAML script, during lunch hour what you can’t do in days of writing code with others.
In fact, not only do we apply that principle to our products in general, but to other operational things we do at Ansible, Inc. - from our internal communication to the onboarding process of new employees to how we handle customer support tickets. We are building an organization and an enterprise product based on simplicity. In fact, I’ve become a strong believer in the notion that complex Continue reading
Thanks Michael!
3 years ago, Michael DeHaan started the Ansible open source project. Michael has worked tirelessly and done a great job leading the Ansible vision of simple IT automation, and his efforts led to some amazing achievements. Ansible is now a mature open source project and vibrant community, with over 900 contributors (a new contributor almost every day!), thousands of users and millions of downloads. Ansible was recently named a Top 10 Open Source project for 2014, alongside projects like Hadoop, Docker, and OpenStack.
As of today, Michael will be transitioning from his daily operational involvement with Ansible, Inc. to an advisory capacity supporting the community and the Ansible team as needed. You can read more about Michael’s thoughts on the transition here.
As for Ansible, we are grateful for Michael’s vision and efforts and look forward to his continued contributions. He and the Ansible community have set a new standard for simple, agentless automation, and we will continue to build great things on that strong foundation.
