Red Hat Delivers Managed Ansible Automation for Microsoft Azure 

BOSTON, May 10, 2022 -- Red Hat, Inc., a leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure, pairing industry-leading hybrid cloud automation with the convenience and support of a managed offering. Supported by Red Hat and Microsoft, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure enables IT organizations to quickly automate and scale in the cloud, with the flexibility to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity.

With Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, customers can benefit from low overhead, integrated billing with Microsoft, the latest Ansible Automation Platform features, and packaged cloud content. To get started faster, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure customers can use out-of-the-box automation content that includes existing automation processes unique to the Azure experience. Users can migrate applications and resources as they transition to the cloud, helping to accelerate the adoption and value of automation.

Expanding What’s Possible in Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure builds on the continuous innovations in Ansible Automation Platform, refined for the evolving realities of computing at hybrid cloud scale. Ansible Automation Platform 2 introduced self-contained automation capabilities to meet customers wherever they are, whether via managed service providers, their own datacenters, at the edge or in cloud marketplaces like Azure. The platform’s capabilities across hybrid IT environments makes it easier for IT teams to address automation needs at scale across varied environments and systems with consistency.

New capabilities in Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 make it even more powerful on Azure. For example, Ansible content signing technology validates automation content, empowering IT teams to use varied content sources, whether from Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections or the Ansible community, with confidence that the content is suitable for their organization’s systems security and compliance needs.

Partners like Accenture, CyberArk, F5 and Kyndryl have validated their Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collections and overall experience on Microsoft Azure, enabling customers to run the Collections and playbooks they are using today in the cloud, extending standardized automation content wherever operations require it.

Availability

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure is now available to all customers in North America, with global availability coming soon. The Ansible Automation Platform 2.2 features are available for customers in tech preview.

Supporting Quotes

Thomas Anderson, vice president, Ansible, Red Hat

“With enterprise-wide automation as a strategic objective for IT departments, especially as system complexity grows, extensibility across the expanding footprints of IT environments is a must have. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure extends automation workflows across the hybrid cloud while easing the management requirements of the underlying platform. This enables customers to easily use validated content from Red Hat and our partners for workloads from the cloud to the datacenter to the edge, while helping to mitigate the overall complexity that modern IT typically brings.”

Omar Khan, general manager, Azure Infrastructure, Microsoft

“Our collaboration with Red Hat helps us accelerate our customers' digital transformation by simplifying the path to cloud adoption. Many of our enterprise customers have a hybrid cloud strategy and are looking for flexibility and consistency to seamlessly deploy, run and scale applications across Azure and hybrid cloud environments. With offerings like the new Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure, operations teams can automate myriad processes that must be executed with and alongside application delivery.”

Raj Wickramasinghe, Hybrid and Emerging Platform lead, Accenture

"Our clients are in the midst of significant modernization and digital transformation projects – and they’re doing it on compressed timelines. Automation is the key to realizing new levels of efficiency, agility and resilience. Drawing on our decades long partnership with Microsoft and experience with Azure, Accenture is developing solutions on Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and has helped a client reduce downtime by 100% and increase development time by 50% – just one example of how we’re delivering strategic initiatives faster across the cloud continuum, from public to private to edge computing.”

Kurt Sand, general manager, DevSecOps, CyberArk

“Mitigating risk and defending against cyber attacks requires visibility and managed access to critical resources across the enterprise. The new Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure makes it incredibly easy for CyberArk users to make DevOps more secure and agile, freeing developers from the need to worry about Identity Management. With Ansible, credentials are centrally managed by CyberArk, and secrets used by Ansible are automatically secured and rotated by CyberArk based on the organization’s policies.”

Phil de la Motte, vice president, Business Development, F5

“F5 and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform have a longstanding partnership that provides significant automation benefits to joint customers, with the new managed application extending these capabilities to the Azure cloud. Now, customers can leverage existing automations, such as those provided by Ansible Playbooks, to easily migrate workloads for modernization and digital transformation initiatives. This new offering empowers joint customers to accelerate and expand the automation of their BIG-IP solutions in Azure. We see this as a valuable addition to our mutual Microsoft Azure ecosystem that will help customers secure, deliver, and optimize every app and API, anywhere.”

Stephen Leonard, Global Alliances and Partnerships leader, Kyndryl

“Many customers are choosing automation solutions for greater efficiency, agility and resilience to drive their significant modernization and digital transformation projects. The combination of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure provides customers with a powerful automation solution to accelerate their cloud initiatives, along with the ease of a managed application. As a strategic partner to both Microsoft and Red Hat, we can provide full support across our ecosystem for customers to achieve the highest level of automation in delivery, service and business agility."

Carlos E. Caicedo Bastidas, associate professor at the School of Information Studies and director of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies, Syracuse University

“The ability to automate at scale and extend a consistent policy-driven approach to service delivering services across the hybrid cloud is absolutely essential to managing today’s cloud-native production environments. This new offering allows us to embed cloud automation that is already optimized and integrated with Microsoft Azure, into the student curriculum and environments.”

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies. Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

Source: Red Hat