I think the price point here is about a couple of things:<p>- Chef and Puppet are too expensive for most companies to acquire, and have too much operational cost for too little revenue<p>- Ansible got a strong following in the SMB space, Red Hat probably thinks they can move that upmarket some<p>- Ansible's agentless configuration management has potentially strong applicability in a container world (why do I need a chunky agent to configure resources on my docker image? What if, for some reason, I need to affect change on running docker images? - I realize this is a bit of an anti-pattern for docker, but it was something I heard a lot from big enterprises)<p>$100m still sounds very high, kudos to the ansible folks who have come a long way in the last few years.<p>EDIT: one more piece I didn't think of here - the openstack side of things is an area where Red Hat has made big long-term bets for the future of the company, and it probably helps to justify the price in terms of backstopping their openstack support.
This clearly is much more about Tower, consultancy, etc, than their main product, but their yaml encoded language is an abomination; masquerading as 'declarative' and easy to read, yet piling on loops and conditional statements and an unintuitive inheritance tree of global and local variables.
I found this sentence funny "Representatives of Red Hat and Ansible did not immediately respond to requests for comment". I take it to mean: "we wanted to run the story as quickly as possible; still it would have been nice to get superquick comments by RH or Ansible; tough luck, though."
Ansible is best of breed. But didn't Red Hat hear? Immutable infrastructure is the future!<p><a href="http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118717252307/immutable-infrastructure-is-the-future" rel="nofollow">http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118717252307/immutable-infrast...</a>
My experience with Ansible has not been so pleasant. Especially performance is a jobstopper. In my environment it takes 20 min for 12 Servers to be setup with some Redis, Elasticsearch stuff. Quite some become_user directives, but 20 min for this kind of stuff is just not acceptable. After all, application settings needs to be tuned and iterated over, too.<p>My idea was to develop the infrastructure with Ansible, e.g. no ssh to change some httpd settings at all. Everything via Ansible. It worked very well as long as the playbooks and number of servers was very small.
Interesting! Ansible is great technology. Not as mature as Puppet or Chef, but it's getting there. However Red Hat is currently heavily pushing (what I understand to be) their own fork of Puppet inside Satellite 6. So quite a few RHEL customers in the process of rolling out the latest Satellite is probably going to want to hedge their investment in it. Perhaps there is some Red Hatter here who could comment?
Ansible is a fantastic tool. I put it up there with Rails, Backbone, and jQuery. The shadow of Puppet and Chef is large, but many are starting to see the light.<p>I hope that Redhat will accelerate the growth of this very well engineered platform.<p>Congrats to the Ansible team!
Supposedly a > $100mm deal. Both companies are already headquartered in N.C., and Ansible has a ton of momentum in the RHEL and OpenStack arenas, so it would make sense to pull the project into the fold.<p>One thing I wonder is how much the project's priorities would shift away from (if at all) anything non-RHEL-centric.
It is official now <a href="https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acquire-it-automation-and-devops-leader-ansible" rel="nofollow">https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-acqui...</a>
Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell.<p>Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.
This does make me wonder how it'll impact their eventual move to Python3. They've been hesitant to move due to a lot of their customer base being on RHEL5/CentOS5, I can't imagine that this move will help matters.
I always wonder why cf-engine is so unpopular on HN. It has some nice advantages like no dependency on ssh or a scripting language. It is not as simple to get started, though.
Hi all. I am a GM at Red Hat, and I have been deeply involved in the acquisition of Ansible. It's great to see so much interest and so many good questions. I hope that my blog post can help answering some of them:
<a href="http://www.redhat-cloudstrategy.com/why-did-red-hat-acquire-ansible/" rel="nofollow">http://www.redhat-cloudstrategy.com/why-did-red-hat-acquire-...</a><p>Alessandro
I think that this will fit nicely with the Cockpit project which should "revolutionize" remote administration (it isn't bad). So now Red Hat wants to add something for wholesome orchestration, which was really needed in that space.
I like what I've seen of ansible but a lot of their modules are a complete mess. I've run into problems with both their AWS and Docker modules and ended up resorting to a series of tasks running shell commands because it was more reliable and didn't require me to install a specific version of some python library on every single machine.
If you're new to Ansible. I've created about two hours of free screencasts on it. It's a very simple to use and understand configuration management tool.<p><a href="https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansible-part-1-4" rel="nofollow">https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansibl...</a><p><a href="https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/45-learning-ansible-with-vagrant-part-2-4" rel="nofollow">https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/45-learning-ansible-with-...</a><p><a href="https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/46-configuration-management-with-ansible-part-3-4" rel="nofollow">https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/46-configuration-manageme...</a><p><a href="https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/47-zero-downtime-deployments-with-ansible-part-4-4" rel="nofollow">https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/47-zero-downtime-deployme...</a>