There’s a new player in the open source IT automation space that is looking to challenge rival tools from vendors such as Puppet Labs and Opscode.
AnsibleWorks has been launched as a corporate entity in support of Ansible, an IT automation framework that is based on a simple declarative language that doesn’t require IT organizations to learn a specific programming language.
According to AnsibleWorks CEO Saïd Ziouani, while Ansible is written in Python, it can be executed within any application development language an IT organizations prefers.
In time, Ziouani says that Ansible will also deliver a commercial version of Ansible that can be deployed across multiple data centers in support of activities such as disaster recovery, and a hosted version that can be invoked as a service via the company’s support for RESTful application programming interfaces.
While the concept of IT automation has been around for a while, with the advent of open source tools, IT automation has been gaining momentum at a time when enterprise IT is more complex to manage than ever. IT automation tools allow IT administrators to unify the management of server, storage and networking in a way that makes the data center essentially programmable.
It may take a little while longer for most IT organizations to master the nuances of IT automation tools. But as most of them can already plainly see, throwing IT administrators at the IT scalability challenge simply isn’t going to be economically feasible.