Red Hat is buying Ansible • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#21

Post by creshal » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:39 AM UTC

geerlingguy wrote: post #2

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. One thing I wonder is how much the project's priorities would shift away from (if at all) anything non-RHEL-centric.

> One thing I wonder is how much the project's priorities would shift away from (if at all) anything non-RHEL-centric.

Going by projects like NetworkManager it'll work okay, but you'll need to be a paying RedHat customer to get any useful documentation.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#22

Post by carlsborg » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:40 AM UTC

Congrats mpdehaan2. Good to see good engineering getting rewarded. Testament to a great project you conceived and started.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#23

Post by devnonymous » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:44 AM UTC

marcoamorales wrote: post #11

devnonymous wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine it is not so much about Ansible's general valuation in the industry but about its value for Red Hat (a.k.a -- Red Hat is not buying Ansible for its revenues but for its technology).

What are you buying when the technology is open source?

The direction in which the technology evolves. That's also the reason why Red Hat hires a lot of upstream developers[1]. It is easier to tailor your services and offer better support (ie: the revenue stream for Red Hat) for OSS when the developers who write it are on your payroll.

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions
  http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/red-hat-leads-open-source-contributions-to-kernel

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#24

Post by Schiphol » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:52 AM UTC

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."

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#25

Post by kzhahou » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 7:59 AM UTC

mianos wrote: post #9

If ansible is worth 100 what is saltstack worth?

Are you implying it's worth more or less?

Or not implying anything but hoping someone here has an answer or analysis?

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#26

Post by leg100 » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:05 AM UTC

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.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#27

Post by AhtiK » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:06 AM UTC

srvg wrote: post #16

ptio wrote: post #5

Ansible creator, founder and CTO Michael DeHaan previously worked at Red Hat where he helped build Cobbler.

Also, Michael DeHaan stepped down and left the company early 2015.

So this could explain why his very active github activities suddenly stopped early 2015, I just presumed it was due to consciously allocating more time for management and leadership.

His github contributions rate and depth for ansible while still the CEO in y2014 has been a great inspiration for me.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#28

Post by dspillett » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:16 AM UTC

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 important to their world view). If I were RedHat or Ansible and read that sentence the reporter and/or outlet would be added to a "never respond to these people for at least 24 hours" list...

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#29

Post by awjr » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:21 AM UTC

nzoschke wrote: post #7

Ansible is best of breed. But didn't Red Hat hear? Immutable infrastructure is the future! http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118717252307/immutable-infrast...

I was using ansible with packer https://www.packer.io/ to build AMIs (Amazon Machine Images). I'm spending a lot more time with docker these days though.

I see Ansible as primarily an orchestration tool.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#30

Post by djloche » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 8:21 AM UTC

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…

The appropriate line for online publication is "We reached out to both x and y for comment and will update this article with any responses we receive."