Huawei today announced the release of its CloudEngine switch networking modules for Ansible.

Ansible is an open source IT automation framework, initiated and managed by Red Hat. It was created to help developers and IT operators accelerate the deployment of IT applications and environments by automating routine activities such as network configuration, cloud deployments, and creation of development environments.

Huawei’s CloudEngine switches are components of the company’s CloudFabric data center network solution. Its CloudFabric Open Ecosystem project aims to support data centers that can mix cloud platforms, management tools, network devices, and network services from different vendors.

A little over a year ago Red Hat announced that Ansible would support heterogeneous networks, including support for Arista, Cisco, Cumulus Networks, Juniper, and OpenSwitch.net. Huawei was not on the list.

Huawei appears as if it might be late to Ansible’s party, but if it’s lost any time, it seems to be making up for it with this commitment.

Yu Li, general manager of the Huawei Data Center Network Domain, said in a statement, “The Ansible open source community is an important part of our CloudFabric Open Ecosystem,” adding that “Huawei plans to deepen our collaboration through the upstream Ansible community to help further advance network automation innovation.”

A Huawei spokesman also pointed out that this is hardly the first time the company has worked with Red Hat. “Today’s announcement with Ansible by Red Hat is part of a multi-year relationship with Red Hat that has included joint announcements around NFV integration of LTE technology, SDN integration, Huawei’s promotion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to our cloud customers, and targeting carriers with a joint solution to build NFV clouds,” the spokesman told SDxCentral.

Huawei said it has collaborated with the upstream Ansible open source community to create networking modules of its CloudEngine switches specifically for Ansible.

These networking modules can be deployed in production environments to help customers achieve automated network operation and maintenance (O&M) in a more secure, efficient, and reliable way, the vendor said.

Greg DeKoenigsberg, director, Ansible community, said in a statement, “This can help network teams take advantage of new deployment paradigms, including configuration automation, test-driven network deployment, and continuous compliance.”

Huawei provided some context for the announcement. It said that cloud computing and virtualization have promoted the development of microservices and container technologies, which in turn can help simplify the implementation of DevOps, a model combining development and operations capabilities.

Huawei said it noticed that the upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub.