Red Hat announced the general availability of the latest version of its IT automation platform Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 today. The release adds improvements to three key areas of automation — simplifying multicloud provisioning, enhancing network capabilities and simplifying management in Windows.
According to the company, it was able to simplify multicloud provisioning through updated provisioning modules with improved support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure virtualization infrastructures both on-premises and in the public cloud, each with capabilities that bring them in line with updates to those respective cloud platforms. The new modules extend automation beyond the operating system layer, and since all provisioning and management of a multicloud infrastructure is done through a single tool in Red Hat Ansible Engine, policies can be set across multiple environments at once, including in legacy infrastructure with the improved VMware vSphere deployment support including VMware Cloud on AWS, the company explained.
With enhancements to Red Hat Ansible Network Automation in version 2.6, the company has begun to streamline the process of applying network modules across a multicloud environment by providing a single catch-all language for configurations instead of having to learn multiple vendor-specific configuration commands. Version 2.6 also rolls in support for InfoBlox, with configurations for critical DDI services.
“The fully-supported Infoblox modules available in Ansible Engine 2.6 enable customers to more easily automate the IP address selection, reservation, assignment, and retirement process without human intervention,” the company wrote in the announcement. “Additionally, the Infoblox support enables users deploying systems across multiple clouds as well as virtualization platforms to more effectively automate their IP address management next to their application deployments.”
Meanwhile, improved automation capabilities for Ansible running in a Windows environment enhances “managing computers and active directory, scheduling tasks, and better error handling,” the company wrote.
Additionally, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 makes it easier to programmatically extend into Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Virtualization, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure with new plugins that improves how Ansible handles data and inventory, the company explained.
The updated Red Hat Ansible Engine is available through the company’s customer portal, and launches alongside Ansible Galaxy 3.0, a community and partner-driven hub for searching and sharing Ansible content, configurations and roles.
