Red Hat Launches Ansible Certification Initiative

Red Hat, at an AnsibleFest 2018 conference, today launched a Red Hat Ansible Automation Certification Program aimed at software and hardware vendors using its open source framework to automate the management of their offerings.

The goal of the effort is to ensure that tools and frameworks being provided by those vendors meet a minimum level of quality. Ansible Modules and Plugins that are developed through Red Hat and its partners are scanned against known vulnerabilities, checked for compatibility and validated to work in production environments.

At launch, Cisco, CyberArk, F5 Networks, Infoblox, NetApp, and Nokia are all participating in the certification program. Red Hat claims this limited ecosystem partners alone are expected to offer more than 275 Ansible Certified modules beyond what Red Hat built and supports on its own.

Red Hat next plans to automate a certification process that today relies on too much manual effort, says Justin Nemmers, general manager for Ansible at Red Hat.

Red Hat right now has only a handful of vendors participating in the certification process. But Nemmers notes there are over a thousand vendors using the open source Ansible framework to automate the management of their platforms. The expectation is most of those vendors will be participating once Red Hat starts to automate the process, adds Nemmers.

Red Hat will be actively promoting automation content that is certified amongst its customer base, adds Nemmers. Red Hat claims there are now over two million systems deployed that are being managed by Ansible Tower framework, the version of Ansible that Red Hat commercially supports.

“It’s a lot easier to catch flies with honey than vinegar,” says Nemmers.

Much of the expansion in the adoption of Ansible has been driven by a desire to automate the management of systems using a declarative framework that doesn’t require IT administrators to master a programming language. In effect, Ansible provides a framework for creating a software-defined infrastructure that spans multiple classes of hardware and software that either layers on top of other frameworks or, in some cases, obviates the need for another framework.

It’s not clear to what degree the quality of the implementations of various Ansible automation frameworks has become. But solution providers across the channel should gear up for a significant push from Red Hat to make sure that whatever automation that has been deployed lives up to a set of standards it has now set.