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Report: Red Hat Buying DevOps Startup Ansible (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to VentureBeat Red Hat Inc is about to buy the company behind the automation and orchestration software Ansible. The move is seen as a good acquisition, since Ansible, other than being almost universally expanding, is also used by Red Hat's own cloud and system platforms. It could probably use some strong backing for the extra services it wishes to offer. The question remains whether this will have consequences in the future direction of the Python-based, open source platform itself (on GitHub). It's one of the most trivial to implement (compared to cfengine, ever-changing puppet or Chef) yet very powerful, and Red Hat may want to optimize it for their own purposes.
Update: 10/16 15:39 GMT by S : Red Hat has confirmed the acquisition and explained their reasons for doing so.
And make it depend on systemd.
You are all donkeys.Donkeys Heee Hawwww!!Hee Hawww!!Heee hawwww say the donkeys.You all red hat donkeys.
Could not agree more. Using Red Hat Linux is becoming more and more professional misconduct.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Considering the origin of the very word "ansible" -- Ursula K. le Guin's anarchist-syndicalist novel The Dispossessed -- this money hogwash reeks of irony.
Yet another VCgasm before the party ends?
that Red Hat is controlling or attempting to control the direction of Linux subtly and not so subtly. Where Red Hat goes, so goes Linux in many ways.
Not exactly seeing folks cast off VMWare for RHEV - and they've had that for awhile now. ;)
It'll be interesting to see what they do with Ansible; I just hope they don't bork it up. I use Puppet mostly everywhere I've been (with one exception that had Chef, but I live in PDX so your mileage may vary), but Ansible does get used here and there, and seems pretty solid.
Maybe it'll be an impetus for Puppetlabs to step up its game (like that C-compiled variant they've been working on that runs hella faster, for starters.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Could not agree more. Using Red Hat Linux is becoming more and more professional misconduct.
Red Hat is the twenty-first century incarnation of Microsoft of the twentieth century.
The Ansible guys are decent and a good amount of them are in NC with Redhat and are ex-Redhat, so I am sure that was a big factor. I just wish I would have tried harder to get a position with them 6 months ago :P.
As far as the future. Everything is going go and there will be no real CM systems, just Docker or other deployment scripts. Bare metal will just bootp in to a good packer base and cloud-init will take care of every where else. So it is a great time to get out of the CM business.
Where I work, RHEL is one of the two Linux distributions which are approved to connect to the network. The other is CentOS if the system owner is OK with no support from central IT.
We *may* get a third option eventually.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Because DevOps means nothing.
Another sign that RedHat is going down the crapper. First systemd, now this.
Finally, the year of Linux on the Desktop, now that RH will have faster-than-light communications!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Why buy what you can download for free? They after the talent or something?
Somebody could convince me with data to the contrary but as far as I can tell Redhat puts the most money into Linux and pays the most developers to work on Linux, therefore the most work is coming out of Red Hat, therefore Redhat work gets adopted at a proportionally higher level. There doesn't need to be any conspiracy - Redhat has the money because they're popular because people like the work they do. It's a totally competitive marketplace - their dominance in enterprise is because their stuff works and is of good quality, not because of any sort of monopolistic bundling agreements - in a free market we cheer the winners!
That said, this is an area in which Redhat has been sorely lacking. If a competitor had come along with a tightly-integrated package manager and DevOps system that would couple with a network deployment system for effective cloud provisioning, Redhat would face some very fast and very intense competition to stay relevant. Fortunately they seem to realize this (finally). They could still blow it by not getting the necessary hooks all the way down into rpm, so their success is not guaranteed.
Now that PuppetLabs has destroyed everything by making puppet 4 incompatible with puppet 3, I'll take a look at ansible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This has come at a time when our company is evaluating puppet and ansible for deployment of Jboss EAP and applications. I see this as another plus on the "ansible" side, for several reasons. Firstly it will be a lot easier getting support with possible JBoss deployment issues, there will be one port of call. Secondly the large company backing is a plus. And finally there is a very strong possibility of future integration.
I wonder if it will be integrated int Jboss Operations Network. It looks a lot slicker than the current ant-based deployment architecture.
but Red Hat seems to have a disproportionate level of control over the direction of Linux, kernel itself aside.
It's like they have dumped a lot of resources and money on Linux development and now they seek to make a profit of it HOW THEY DARE!
FWIW, I've worked for Red Hat for the last year and a half as part of the Inktank Acquistion (IE working on Ceph). So far, Red Hat has been pretty reasonable. There are more RH specific initiatives around Ceph now, and a more of our QA happens on CentOS/RHEL, but the core development process has remained largely the same. In some ways, things are better as Red Hat has encouraged that some of the projects our business folks previously did not want to open source (our Web based monitoring UI) be made community projects. Like any big company there are a lot of different people with a lot of different agendas, but honestly for a company of Red Hat's size I'm fairly happy with how things have gone. You hear about acquisitions being total nightmares for everyone involved. While there have been challenges, at least in my mind, Red Hat is as good of an open source steward as we could have hoped for. I'd much rather see Ansible in Red Hat's hands than many other companies out there today.
"Did you hear? Donkey Guy just switched back to cows. Yeah, apparently we're just supposed to forget that whole donkey thing ever happened. Man, what a disgusting sell-out.
"And get this, I hear that he could only get ONE of the original cows back. The one with the heroin problem. None of the other cows would answer his calls, after what he did."
Now that PuppetLabs has destroyed everything by making puppet 4 incompatible with puppet 3, I'll take a look at ansible.
Most of that "incompatibility"? It's not like it's that hard to upgrade. To be honest, for most of it? If (for instance) you haven't quoted your strings all this time (and if you haven't kept your booleans non-quoted), then it's more your fault than theirs; clean your shiz up.
(...and seriously, they even include future parser in the later 3.x versions to check for all that shit beforehand, so it's not like nobody got warned for something like 6-9 months in advance...)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Snakes Hissssss!!Hissss!!Hissssss... say the snakes.You all cowy snakes.
I'm the *nix guy where I work so I get a fair amount of latitude. My bosses really don't care what distro I pick as long as the end goal is met. We don't pay for support because we don't need it, hence we don't want or need Red Hat or SUSE. I picked Debian stable for our last need of about 35 individual machines running Linux. The end users don't see the Linux underneath, just the software that runs atop Debian.
We have a server project coming up that requires a very stable set of tools because several hundred people will be relying on these tools. I've decided based on my own experience and testing over the years to build this HA server set using FreeBSD. In the last year or so, my experience and testing with FreeBSD and OpenBSD has been very rewarding. Moreover, I really dislike the direction Linux has taken with systemd. I'm not going to start a flame fest, but needless to say, quite a few Linux admins I keep in touch with are also considering FreeBSD.
I've noticed that BSD in general seems to be better engineered. Linux feels like a series of hacks in many ways, while BSD feels solid and well thought out.
Is it web scale too?
You can beat the life cycle though, especially if using centos. Besides if you know what you are doing you can swap out stock for bleeding edge while still keeping that long life cycle mostly intact. That said I'm still a gentoo guy for my virtual workstations.
Flame, flame, flame, I do not want to flame, but flame, flame, flame.
I sounds the same to me as "I'm not a racist, but...."
It's interesting that they bought out another tool when they already do some of the work a configuration management tool does with their satellite server, and for a larger setup integrate/sell puppet enterprise (one of Ansible's main competitors).
As an Ansible fan and user, that is comforting to hear. Also gives me some hope they'll open source Tower.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
That's because you're the racist.
They don't care, but they should. Letting you run their operations as if it's a little alchemy lab is bad for the long-term health of the business, and shows that you are far from a professional "*nix guy."
Building an operating footprint that includes a mish-mash of various platforms is going to cause you problems. Injecting your political preferences into your choice of operating system further underscores your complete lack of ability.
OP here. You're not making sense. Everyone has preferences from a professional standpoint. Companies use what they are comfortable with, what they know. I neither know, nor want to know Windows Server, IIS, or anything like it. I have used *nix since college in the 90s and it's all I know. I make a good living with it.
I also don't work for a public company; I work for a non-profit that gives employees loads of latitude. When I say they don't care, it's not that they are dismissive of tech. I work for an IT guy, but there is no compelling reason for us to purchase support or buy licensed software. I document the living daylights out of everything we touch, so anyone can come behind me and make sense of what we have done and are doing.
Having Debian on one side of the house and FreeBSD on another is not a mish-mash. Both are POSIX-compliant operating environments and they both integrate well with what we have going on. I don't implement things I don't understand or know well. I have a reputation of being averse to risk, hence my reasoning behind Debian stable and FreeBSD (after much testing). I want toolsets that have a reputation for quality and longevity. We are minimalist here, using a *nix OS, Python, a little JSON, Javascript, and a backend database that sadly isn't open source, but that's coming in due time. A non-profit is also much more constrained in the amount of money it can spend on things that don't focus on the core mission. IT in general is an expense. We don't focus on ROI, we focus on the mission being achieved for the least amount of money while not compromising in any known way. Not using RedHat or other in no way leaves us vulnerable. On the contrary, it frees us up to focus on how we can make things better, faster, safer. I don't waste time with license management like so many of my friends do. I don't worry about falling afoul of the BSA, or losing support because I forgot to pay. We have one Windows Server running SQL server, but that box is old and needs to be replaced, so it will be within the next year, likely with MariaDB or PostgreSQL, both of which, under testing, will run well in this environment.
I've worked with Chef and puppet for a few years each and evaluated ansible at my current company because it's the new buzzword and it's clientless. My concerns for not wanting to go with Ansible for system management was that to get the web endpoints for things like auto-scaling you have to get Tower. And if I'm going to pay $10k to setup tower, I might as well setup a Chef server which will scale FAR more than Tower will on the same hardware and will cost substantially less. Also, to really be effective with Ansible you need to setup a user/password (or ssh keypair) combination which I really don't like because if it's compromised, you're whole infrastructure is compromised. Chef has safeguards to help with this and you'd still have a bit of panic if a key is compromised, but you're not required to put "root" keys on everything. So there's still damage, but it's mitigated and can be corrected. Finally, Chef 12 really helps give me overall system state of everything out of the box which I absolutely love. You don't get that with Ansible until you get Tower.. Anyway, my two cents.. I am curious though what this means for Ansible moving forward.
You guys are all just down right silly in your hatred for Red Hat. In all seriousness Linux would not be where it is today without some enterprise commercial backing driving the qa, and support of this software. Many of these nice features that we all take for granted today on a modern Linux distribution are because of companies like Red Hat. Red Hat is an open source company, when they acquire a company all they really are doing is bringing on more head count in software engineers. Employing these engineers that contribute to these open source projects helps keeping them going. Remember the software is open source and in the community. The community drives what direction the software goes and if there is a feature missing or something broken you are more than welcome to file a rfe or bzt. Even better you can fix or add what you and want and contribute it upstream.
The power of open source.
I know its fun and all to rebel against "the man", but damn this shit is just getting old
Quality title there, that "Report:" improves it so much.
Red Hat open sources everything.
period, point blank.
full stop.
end of story.
In previous environments I worked at, RHEL had one major feature, and that was FIPS and EAL Common Criteria compliance. This doesn't sound like a big thing, but the certification means a lot when audits happen [1].
There are not many Linux distros that have this. RedHat, SuSE, and Oracle are the only ones on the list. The ironic thing is that none of these have RedHat 7 or downstream as certified (am guessing due to the fact that systemd requires a lot of auditing, it is still being evaluated.)
[1]: Especially when working at a job where it had random audits where the auditors would ask for the certification (RHCE, MCSE, CCIE) of people, and if their certs were expired, they would be fired on the spot for "failure to maintain adequate training for operation of security sensitive machinery."
Hmm... Not sure if serious?
I ran, successfully even, a business for a long time before I sold it. I didn't give the dev team tools to use nor did I give the IT staff tools to use. They told me the tools they needed and that's what they got. They know better than I, that's why I hired them. Amazingly enough, it worked out fine.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This pretty much cements the trend - Ansible has been increasingly popular over the last couple of years: http://www.google.com/trends/e...
Wonder if they'll soon find a good way to integrate it with Spacewalk (Satellite).
Also, will Canonical grab SaltStack now? :)
[1a] - seems like a not-so-nice place to work - wow ! - did they at least 'pay' for you to maintain the cert which would seem to be part of the terms of employment ?
ummmmm.....not really. RH Network/Satellite for one example. Very similar notionally, built off the same base perhaps, but identical and open source naaaaaaahhhhh......
Red Hat Satellite is open source - Spacewalk.
With OpenStack gaining momentum, RHEV is nice, but with libvirt, a CM, PXE booting and provisioning, it isn't really needed to get compute nodes up.
The one thing about Ansible which is nice is the fact that it doesn't require a client installed. Just throw a SSH key onto the client, and go from there. However, Puppet has more flexibility in the fact that you can run with "puppet master" servers and push out manifests, or masterless and have clients pull manifests from something like a local github install.
As of now, there are a lot of choices in the CM market. The next year or so will do a lot in weeding the competition down. I'd guess Puppet and SCOM/SCVMM/SCCM will survive, but after that, it will be a toss-up beteween Chef and Ansible in what is a mainstream CM.
The key will likely will be Windows support, especially when Windows Server 2016 hits RTM and brings with it a new generation of hypervisor features and distributed storage (think VMWare vSAN.)
Red Hat is the twenty-first century incarnation of Microsoft of the twentieth century.
Ahh; yes. Because RedHat has completely crushed Ubuntu.
No. RedHat is controlling the future of Linux because they actually put up the people who write the successful stuff. If you don't like systemd then you can use Slackware. The thing is, though, that in real life Slackware, great though it is, has limited influence on the future of Linux because limited amounts of new useful software is generated there.
As long as RedHat is largely working with GPL software they will never be able to be anything like MS. When, like Google and co, they start pushing almost exclusively Apache and BSD licensed stuff, that's the point you need to start worrying.
Not exactly seeing folks cast off VMWare for RHEV [redhat.com] - and they've had that for awhile now. ;)
That's likely to change, as with newer versions of ESXi can no longer be managed without a license for VCenter. Not very practically, anyway. Sure, companies with an investment in VMWare are unlikely to jump ship, but there will be more engineers and independent consultants using other tools, and those are the tools they will start recommending for businesses looking to invest in VM.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I believe this implies the death of the Katello project, something I've been looking forward to as stable.
Not only that, but RH is quite willing to work with their apparent competitors, like Debian, for the benefit of everyone. If there's any company that understands that a rising tide lifts all boats, it's RH.
I'm not really sure. I say this because I've seen what happens when this happens. I watched as a consultant said something like 'OMG let's replace Puppet with Salt!' just because he hated Ruby, loved Python, and happened to use Salt on his personal dev machines. Note that he did all this over my objections.
Long story short, the consultant is long gone. The company he did that to is now desperately looking for someone who knows how to use Salt in a production environment (because the guy they trained to admin a Salt environment had up and left). I suspect that it's going to cost them a very pretty penny to either get one or train one now, and they're not exactly known for generous paychecks.
(I'd left this company long ago, but recruiters gonna recruit, and when I heard from one as he was detailing this predicament, I nearly doubled over laughing.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Using Red Hat Linux is becoming more and more professional misconduct.
The last time I applied for a Linux job, the Red Hat Linux GUI was a requirement for remote command line work. I was unable to convince the recruiter that not knowing the GUI wasn't a disadvantage, as opening a terminal window was all I needed for the job. In fact, I prefer using a minimalist window manager on Linux. The recruiter hanged up on me.
The worst threat to freedom are happy (and dumb) slaves. You qualify.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The difference here is that you wanted to have a successful business, and did. The ones criticizing you have big egos and small actual business skills. They think that "running a business" means imposing your personal preferences on the people that work for you, just like a business was a little authoritarian state where everything must be controlled from the top. That is a recipe for failure, even if it takes a long time to manifest.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yes, _those_. The people that think security can be created by bureaucratic process. These are really the worst. I am constantly amazed how many people need to be told that "compliance" does not ensure security at all and vice versa. It is the same mind-set that thinks forbidding something makes it vanish.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The level of stupidity in that is staggering. I do remote management, testing, development etc. all the time (currently Linux and Solaris) and the only thing (with very rare exceptions) I use is ssh without X-forwarding. As to window-manager, I mostly need it to arrange xterms (and one web-browser window). Fvwm with its pager is perfect for that and I have not had to adjust anything in about 10 years.
This also shows one fundamental problem the whole IT industry has today: Recruiters are utterly clueless. That is why so many bad coders get jobs.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I have no idea how those companies get anything done nor how they manage to succeed. If I hired you then that's because you can do something I can not. Tell me what you need, tell me to get out of the way, and do what needs to be done. I don't know what IDE you want. I don't know what OS you prefer. I don't care - even if it's expensive.
Tell me what you need and I'll do my absolute best to make sure it's in the budget (it WILL be in there) and we will get the job done and have a happy client and a great financial reward. Which means we can last until we have the next big client and polish out stuff while we wait - until we reached a point where we no longer went without an immediate job and eventually multiple clients at all times.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If the recruiter is an Indian and has a thick accent, they typically follow a script to ask certain questions. I would answer "yes" to all the questions. When the recruiter becomes puzzled and repeat the question near the end because the expected answer is a "no," I will say "no" and say "yes" to the remaining questions. I've gotten a couple interviews that way.
DevOps... I have a Solutions company, someone buy it!
The worst threat to humanity is sheer stupidity. You qualify.
False
truth