Just because your organization has a multi-OS strategy should not automatically increase the complexity of your environment management. Each OS vendor likely drags along its own ecosystem of partners, development platforms, support and capability matrixes, and for the most part, once a system is developed on a particular OS platform, it tends to stay there.

Enter cloud. With growing abstraction of the infrastructure layer, cloud has done a great job of providing enterprise IT organizations with a level of control and flexibility once only available to the most advanced of greenfield deployments.

Even in a cloud-deployed environment, there is still a lot of potential baggage based on your particular cloud vendor, let alone your entire development suite and application platform.  In nearly all cases, once an app is written for a particular platform, it stays on that platform for the entirety of its lifecycle. If your primary cloud vendor doesn’t provide you an easy way to deploy-- in a supported manner-- your preferred application platform, customers face yet another area of complexity. Just like that, you could be stuck with few choices.

This is precisely why the joint Red Hat/Microsoft announcement today is a huge win for customers, and further validates that IT organizations are demanding solutions that provide them the maximum freedom to innovate without friction. As important as choice and freedom is on the infrastructure layer, the ability to seamlessly deploy, manage, and support your critical IT systems can’t be constrained to a limited set of providers or capabilities. To be effective, automation must work on all of your stuff, whether it’s deployed in a cloud, or on-prem, or on RHEL, or Windows, .Net, Python, or Java.

Since the first GitHub commit, we’ve been working to enable both a new level of simplicity in IT and application management, as well as a fantastic amount of choice. Regardless of cloud provider, network, operating system, or deployment process, Ansible is capable of automating and orchestrating the processes you use to deploy and manage your systems, applications, and environments.

The elegance of power and choice combined cannot be overlooked, and today’s announcement is further proof that we’ve had it right all along: automation should be for everyone. It doesn’t-- and shouldn’t-- matter what cloud provider, OS, development platform, or even job function: Ansible was made to make your job easier, and we’ll continue to work to do that no matter what platform you’re using.

Microsoft and Red Hat partner to deliver more flexibility and choice

Enabling today's hybrid reality with broader choice: Red Hat and Microsoft

Click to edit your new post...