DEVOPSdigest

Red Hat announced the Red Hat Ansible Automation Certification Program to more readily deliver tested, trusted and supported Red Hat Ansible Automation.

With more than two million customer systems now managed by Red Hat Ansible Tower, the certification program is intended to help further accelerate user deployment times by providing improved security, reliability and consistency of content.

As IT infrastructures grow in complexity, the need for automation becomes more pressing. To help address the challenge, Red Hat is driving Ansible into more domains and expanding the supported use-cases for automation across infrastructure, networks, containers and more, enabling users to more easily automate more tasks in more ways. In addition, to help organizations more securely expand their automation, Red Hat is now offering certified Ansible content, helping users mitigate risks and security concerns associated with consuming automation content from unknown sources.

Ansible Modules and Plugins that are developed through Red Hat and partners can be submitted to the program, where they are scanned against known vulnerabilities, checked for compatibility and validated to work in production. This provides assurances to end users that a certified module will perform as expected in mission-critical environments.

Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat Ansible Tower users can use the program to more easily find and access certified modules, including those from third-parties. Regardless of whether a module originates from Red Hat or a partner, all content within the program undergoes rigorous evaluation and testing. Additionally, the certified content will have a similar lifecycle to Ansible Engine, are regularly re-evaluated for certification qualification over time, and are fully-backed with Red Hat support.

At introduction, Cisco (ACI, NSO, NX-OS, and UCS product families), CyberArk, F5 Networks, Infoblox, NetApp and Nokia are all participating in the certification program. Together, these ecosystem partners are expected to offer more than 275 Ansible Certified modules in addition to what Red Hat currently supports, helping expand the breadth of enterprise automation.

Joe Fitzgerald, VP, Management, Red Hat, said: “The sheer complexity of modern IT environments make automation a necessity, but production environments require automation tools that are tested and trusted to work in tandem with critical systems. With certified Ansible modules available through the Red Hat Ansible Automation Certification Program, we are providing users with ready access to rigorously tested content with performance that has been verified, all backed by the support and expertise for which Red Hat is known.”