I thought I knew exactly what Red Hat did, and I “knew” Ansible was programming. After all I spent 2 weeks doing an engineering rotation with the INSBU at Cisco. We learned about Puppet, Chef, JSON, Python and Ansible. I am a network engineer, I grouped all of those terms together.
I 1000% support the idea that network configuration and management must be automated. One of the first shockers of our #NFD18 visit at Red Hat was when Peter Sprygada from Red Hat told us Red Hat was a networking company. I felt I had a look on my face like Scooby Doo with an animated “huh”. It was surprising to me that Red Hat considered themselves a networking company. Peter explained the three pillars of their business are Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud-Native App Platforms, and Management and Automation. Well that does not sound like traditional networking, however it does sound like next generation networking. The logical network is incredibly relevant today as are multi-cloud strategies.
I think Red Hat is well positioned and in tune with the industry transitions. Peter dropped another bomb that again left me in Scooby Doo “huh?” mode. He said Ansible is not a programming language. The light bulbs went off, I suddenly got it, Ansible is the link between Python or other language making automation easy to deploy on many switches. Yes, it finally makes sense. Ansible is automation, augmentation, consumption and simplification It is a tool in the toolbox to get us to the automated network. Look out for great things to come with Ansible!
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