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Red Hat is buying Ansible

venturebeat.com

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Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#101

Post by rch »

chr15p wrote: post #35
srvg wrote: post #19

Wondering if RH will let Tower become Open Source.

Red Hat has a history of buying closed source software and releasing it as Open Source (KVM, Gluster, Cloudforms etc) so I would expect Tower to be open sourced. Assuming Ansible have the rights to all the code of course and dont license it from someone else of course.

It's a pretty straightforward Django app, so they could open it up without issue.

They might be more inclined to roll the functionality into one of their other product lines though.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#102

Post by ybx »

qznc wrote: post #61

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.

Is SSH really a dependency you have to worry about though? Basically every server out there runs SSH.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#103

Post by ultramancool »

dspillett wrote: post #28
Schiphol wrote: post #24

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."

To me "did not immediately respond to requests for comment" smacks of neediness and self importance on the reporter's part (answer me now, you fools, don't you know who I am and what power I behold?!) and the people that would respond to such comments being in the middle of dealing with something more important at the time (perhaps answering a queue of queries that came in first, or queries from people who are more i…

See, I actually have more respect for journalists who put things like that.

I don't think it's self-important, but I do think it's important to note that you can't send someone an email at 9 PM on a friday and expect a response. Noting that they did not _immediately_ respond is an important differentiation between not responding at all.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#104

Post by nailer »

mattzito wrote: post #55

I think the price point here is about a couple of things: - Chef and Puppet are too expensive for most companies to acquire, and have too much operational cost for too little revenue - Ansible got a strong following in the SMB space, Red Hat probably thinks they can move that upmarket some - Ansible's agentless configuration management has potentially strong applicability in a container world (why do I need a chunky…

Ansible's Python as well, so will integrate well with the rest of RHEL, whereas Puppet was nearly the only Ruby tool in the Unix sysadmin community.

Not saying that one is better than the other, just than there's more Python out there in sysadminland.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#105

Post by dsmithatx »

INTPenis wrote: post #84
atsaloli wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of mature, CFEngine has been around since 1993 and is now in its third generation. I just wish they would do a little marketing.

I think what makes a product like ansible catch on is its use of a simple scripting language like python. This makes project participation more accessible. Ordinary sysadmins can write their own ansible modules with ease. It's possible that cfengine has that now but ask sendmail about repairing an old reputation.

Actually I think it's more the YAML config files than the fact it's written in Python. I learned 80% of Ansible in probably 10 days of writing playbooks and going through the infrastructure at my new job.

Also I used to work with Puppet in an 8000 server environment and Ansible and Salt both are so much more fun and easy to use than Puppet. I hear the same thing over Chef too.

Last Ansible is the only one that doesn't require any agents installed and does everything via SSH. At first I didn't think I'd like that coming from Puppet but, I can do everything I need to without another daemon to worry about.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#106

Post by crdoconnor »

falcolas wrote: post #99
crdoconnor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After all, settings needs to be tuned and iterated over, too. That's why it has tags. So you can run just the settings states rather than running the whole 20 minute thing over and over again.

You can just run portions of the playbooks, but then you lose the value of a descriptive infrastructure. What does X look like? Depends on when each tag was run.

It shouldn't unless you're very careless. A tag that just updates all of the settings files and restarts the services should have the same effect as the full playbook run.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#107

Post by rjsamson »

nailer wrote: post #104
mattzito wrote: post #55

I think the price point here is about a couple of things: - Chef and Puppet are too expensive for most companies to acquire, and have too much operational cost for too little revenue - Ansible got a strong following in the SMB space, Red Hat probably thinks they can move that upmarket some - Ansible's agentless configuration management has potentially strong applicability in a container world (why do I need a chunky…

Ansible's Python as well, so will integrate well with the rest of RHEL, whereas Puppet was nearly the only Ruby tool in the Unix sysadmin community. Not saying that one is better than the other, just than there's more Python out there in sysadminland.

I don't think that's necessarily true - both Puppet and Chef are Ruby, and you'll often hear Ruby referred to as the "lingua franca" of DevOps.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#108

Post by bovermyer »

dspillett wrote: post #28
Schiphol wrote: post #24

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."

To me "did not immediately respond to requests for comment" smacks of neediness and self importance on the reporter's part (answer me now, you fools, don't you know who I am and what power I behold?!) and the people that would respond to such comments being in the middle of dealing with something more important at the time (perhaps answering a queue of queries that came in first, or queries from people who are more i…

Emphasis yours. That line has existed in journalism for decades. I think it's interesting that the perception exists that this is somehow arrogant; to me, it seems to protect Red Hat/Ansible from the perception that they're uninterested in public relations. Source: I work for a newspaper.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#109

Post by dsmithatx »

falcolas wrote: post #99
crdoconnor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After all, settings needs to be tuned and iterated over, too. That's why it has tags. So you can run just the settings states rather than running the whole 20 minute thing over and over again.

You can just run portions of the playbooks, but then you lose the value of a descriptive infrastructure. What does X look like? Depends on when each tag was run.

With Tower I have dynamic inventories and variables. I can make it as descriptive as I need to and view everything in Tower.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#110

Post by INTPenis »

dsmithatx wrote: post #105
INTPenis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what makes a product like ansible catch on is its use of a simple scripting language like python. This makes project participation more accessible. Ordinary sysadmins can write their own ansible modules with ease. It's possible that cfengine has that now but ask sendmail about repairing an old reputation.

Actually I think it's more the YAML config files than the fact it's written in Python. I learned 80% of Ansible in probably 10 days of writing playbooks and going through the infrastructure at my new job. Also I used to work with Puppet in an 8000 server environment and Ansible and Salt both are so much more fun and easy to use than Puppet. I hear the same thing over Chef too. Last Ansible is the only one that doesn'…

I also came from operating one puppet environment to using ansible, and just like you the major sales points were ease of configuration with YAML and agentless deployment.

But development of the project has been fueled by skyrocketing participation. Myself and a friend of mine have both contributed small bits of code to the project without being professional developers, and looking at the github contributors they are in the thousands for a 3 year old project. Compare that to cfengine's 73 contributors.

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