Ansible roadmap under Red Hat points towards Redmond

Ansible has celebrated its integration into Red Hat by outlining ambitious plans for integration into Windows environments.

Opening Ansiblefest in London today, GM Todd Barr noted that Red Hat and Microsoft “are now friends”, something which he acknowledged many at the open source vendor had expected around the time Hell froze over.

The result is that in a product roadmap update this morning, head of engineering Tim Cramer said Ansible’s Windows support had been in beta “forever” but “we’re going to take that beta tag off”.

Ansible’s senior principal product manager, Bill Nottingham, gave more details on the company’s future plans around Microsoft platforms, including its cloud offering. “We want to add Azure,” he said, “We want the same level of functionality (as it has with other cloud platforms).”

He also said integration with Windows Powershell was on the agenda. “We’re in talks with the Microsoft team on how to make that work.”

Cramer also said Docker and Kubernetes were key focuses for 2.1, while Nottingham added Python 3 support was also high on the agenda.

How long will we have to wait for all this goodness? Nottingham said Ansible wanted to get back to more frequent releases, and 2.1 is apparently slated for late April.

Cramer added that for Tower, Ansible’s paid for product aimed at enterprises, “3.0 is our big release”.

Key plans were a streamlining of the user experience, and an overhaul of the permissions procedures to make it easier to manage large numbers of users. This is in parallel to making the product scale to larger deployments.

At the same time, better notifications are also on the agenda, with integration into the likes of Slack and Bitchat.

Unsurprisingly, integration with more Red Hat products is also a key goal, according to Nottingham. Which isn’t going to put Tower, or Ansible, at odds with its plans for Microsoft. Because we’re all friends now, aren’t we. ®