The 2015 “SDx Cloud Management Report: OpenStack and More,” highlighted the results of a recent survey on cloud architectures and platforms, stating, “When asked what they felt was the most immature component in cloud management, the overwhelming response was the network at 76%.” By including network devices as part of the overall architecture of Ansible, Red Hat customers can benefit from increased IT agility through operational efficiency, bridging the traditional divide between IT operations and networking teams, and advancing agility and modernization efforts.
Using Ansible’s simple, powerful, and agentless approach, organizations will have the ability to unify operational methodologies across their IT infrastructure in a new way - by orchestrating compute, applications, virtualization, and now, networking. This approach offers many customer benefits, including:
· For network teams looking to apply more agile DevOps methodologies to network infrastructures, Ansible can enhance their ability to build and operate heterogeneous network devices, freeing them up to focus on evolving the network to meet the changing business needs instead of manually pushing network configuration.
· For systems and applications teams that wish to include network devices in a holistic approach to application workload management, Ansible’s native network device support enables them to extend their DevOps tools and practices to heterogeneous network devices.
· For executives and senior management concerned about their organization’s ability to automate and orchestrate solutions in an increasingly complex IT environment, Ansible provides a framework that integrates diverse network devices without introducing vertically integrated, vendor specific applications and operational methodologies.
At launch, Red Hat's Ansible networking framework provides support for:
· Arista Networks – Arista EOS;
· Cisco Systems – Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI); Cisco IOS-XE®; Cisco IOS-XR®; and Cisco NX-OS;
· Cumulus Networks – Cumulus Linux;
· OpenSwitch.net – OpenSwitch; and
· Juniper Networks – Junos OS.