In Carahsoft’s new podcast, Mike Garris, Solutions Architect at Red Hat, discusses the rapid adoption of Red Hat Ansible for network automation across federal government agencies and how your team can modernize and streamline operations with Red Hat’s tool for enterprise IT automation.
Rich Savage: Hello, everyone. I'd like to thank you all for joining us today for our latest podcast on automating networks in Federal and civilian agencies by leveraging Red Hat Ansible. I'm Rich Savage on the open source team at Carahsoft and I'm joined today by Mike Garris, senior solutions architect at Red Hat. Mike, thanks for joining us today.
Mike Garris: Thank you very much, Rich. Glad to be here.
Rich Savage: Yeah, it's great to have you here. We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to our public sector customers about network automation and how Red Hat Ansible can assist their agency with their automation efforts. I want to start our discussion by asking you what is the current state of network automation for civilian agencies and how do agency leaders approach the automation process? And if you can give us an idea of maybe some of their questions and concerns.
Mike Garris: So while most organizations are currently doing automation for management of their Linux and Windows systems, now whether that's provisioning or application deployments or security compliance, a lot of them are just now starting to explore what automation can do on the network and even on the storage areas. So automation in general is just really a way to remove manual tasks into a predictable and repeatable fashion to accelerate delivery and business growth. And the easiest way to begin is to identify small, easy wins and allow those to grow into more challenging and complex ones. A lot of the questions I get asked are, and concerns, revolve around compatibility with Ansible and specific network devices. What modules might be available for those, and are there so many features being developed for those specific network devices? And luckily I had run into an instance where a customer had a specific network vendor, that Red Hat hadn't created modules for Ansible to be able to perform automation tasks against. We also have community pages on Ansible Galaxy, as well as Content Collections, which is available from cloud.redhat.com. There's basically certified modules and playbooks created in conjunction with Red Hat and a vendor. These partnerships are really what continued to drive enhancements and it's one of the primary reasons most organizations are using the Red Hat Ansible automation platform.
Rich Savage: Excellent. Thank you for that, Mike. One thing I saw recently was Gartner's network automation study has shown that network automation is the most important topic on CIO's minds moving forward in 2020. Why is this and how does this statistic apply to the civilian agencies?
Mike Garris: I believe that it's largely due to the overall success that automation's already shown. Most organizations have already started on some kind of automation journey, which typically starts with a Linux and the Windows side of the house, but the benefits are apparent and now the conversation has expanded to network automation. So the ability to have Ansible automate your entire infrastructure is really unparalleled. The advantages of being leveraged by commercial customers and government agencies alike. And there's actually a really cool quote that I found from Gartner, it was from October of 2019 and it stated, "Automation is perhaps one of the highest-yielding investments, an entity running its network and make.
Rich Savage: Wow, that's pretty powerful. I you're coming from a background, working with some of these customers, can you share a civilian use case or a customer success story regarding network automation with Red Hat Ansible?
Mike Garris: I did ask around because we have a lot of government agencies that we work for and I was able to get a really good story. I was told I wasn't able to disclose the name, but this large enterprise operation starting with 10,000 Cisco and Arista switches, and they were scaling up to around 20,000. Some of the challenges that they face were complexity, which was a need to manage diverse networking platforms, a lack of operational agility, which slowed time to service delivery on ad-hoc processes and a CAPEX, OPEX expense. So expensive third-party consultants, hardware migration requirements, a lot of those challenges. And one of the reasons that Ansible was successful in resolving those challenges were simplified operations, such as a common interface across platforms and devices, and the workflow orchestration, which is allowing users to be able to create building blocks across the organization, streamline services, creation with Tower API and even service now. And then to be able to scale the organization with playbooks that were created with common operational language across teams, self-service IT approach for consumable resources.
Rich Savage: The scalability is very important, especially when you're talking about enterprise scale for federal government customers. And I guess, in your experience, what have you seen to be the most compelling reasons why agencies choose Red Hat Ansible over alternative automation platforms?
Mike Garris: So one of the three things that I always state are simple, it's powerful and it's agent-less. Those are really the three pillars of what makes Ansible automation platform the top choice when it comes to bringing in an automation tool. It's a single tool that can be used by all teams to move to a collaborative DevSecOps model. As part of that Red Hat-Ansible automation platform, the customer will also get access to analytics and content collections that have been created in conjunction with vendors we work closely with. So these are certified modules and playbooks that can be accessed via your Red Hat customer login or from cloud.redhat.com.
Rich Savage: All right, very good. What are maybe some of the reasons behind the success of Ansible. I've seen Ansible take off over the last couple of years and the adoption is just so widespread, what do you feel is some of the reasons are for that?
Mike Garris: Yeah, I mean the adoption has been incredible and I believe it really starts with the vast Ansible adoption with an open-source community, coupled with vendors wanting to participate in that community to share and provide valuable content that will continue to fuel additional features and enhancements. Ansible is also extremely easy to deploy, easy to learn and easy to execute with the simplified language over a thousand modules for multiple network providers and the ability for a collaborative tool to be used by every team within your organization. Those are really the main driving factors behind the decision to use Red Hat Ansible.
Rich Savage: And if we're looking into the future a little bit, what does the next couple years look like when it comes to network automation and especially in our federal government and the civilian agencies?
Mike Garris: The adoption of Ansible automation will continue to thrive, to expand and contribute to the overall success and the organization will receive. One of the most important reasons for automation is to remove you in there. And it's been proven that with automation the element for human error greatly decreases, staff can focus more on higher-value tasks, and it also allows for a more dynamic environment.
Rich Savage: Well, that was some great content. And thank you so much for your time and valuable insights and information on this very important topic to our federal government customers. And for our listeners, if you're interested in learning more about Ansible automation, you can contact us anytime via email at redhat@carahsoft.com. Thank you very much. Have a great rest of your day.