Red Hat is tying together two of its core platform features in a move to make it easier for organizations to automate work between traditional on-premises and virtual machine (VM)-based infrastructure and their cloud native infrastructure. The work will link Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Platform and its Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) for Kubernetes platform. The combo, which is still in a “preview” stage, will make it easier to work between the two infrastructure environments.

Dave Lindquist, GM and VP of engineering for hybrid cloud management at Red Hat, explained that ACM acts as a control plane across OpenShift clusters to trigger the Ansible Automation Platform capabilities. These include deploying system updates, load balancers, and server resources.

The duo also takes advantage of the OpenShift Kubernetes Operator model to run applications at scale across the OpenShift deployments and outside of the Kuberentes clusters.

“To me it's how we can really start scaling the cloud native, container, Kubernetes world within the enterprise into all the different types of disciplines, IT technologies, and practices they have through this integration with Ansible,” Lindquist said.

Red Hat launched the ACM platform in late April. It provides a single control point for the monitoring and deployment of OpenShift clusters at scale and supports policy-driven governance and application lifecycle management for those clusters. This support runs across OpenShift on-premises, on bare metal, or on the major cloud hyperscalers.

Lindquist explained that ACM is run on OpenShift and uses the Kubernetes architecture to have an established control plane with all of the underlying clusters. This also allows for clusters to be provisioned or upgraded through the same OpenShift access control and for users to establish access privileges and policies from the same control plane.

“ACM is really a cloud native management system designed for Kubernetes and designed to manage your clusters,” Lindquist explained. “It’s designed to manage your security and compliance and designed to manage applications that are deployed into those clusters and across clusters in a hybrid environment. So when I say manage your clusters it's about managing clusters [and] lifecycle, wherever they're deployed within your data center across all the usual public clouds, even in hosted models where there's a cloud service spinning up the clusters.”

Ansible has been Red Hat’s long-running automation platform. It was updated today with new automation packages for OpenShift and VMware vSphere REST APIs, a Private Automation Hub that allows enterprise developers to work together using trusted and verified sources, and a new connector path that allows organizations to tap into automation services.

Lindquist also said that the combo could play an important role in the rollout of 5G services. Red Hat recently scored a significant deal with 5G equipment vendor Samsung to run 5G services on OpenShift, and it plays a big part in parent company IBM’s 5G efforts.

“You'll see how ACM and OpenShift certainly have been playing a role in the rollout of 5G as all these telcos start shifting to container network virtualization and how they can more dynamically set up network services,” Lindquist said. “[We’ve seen] a lot of engagements and focus on that space with Ansible. They also need this reach particularly the far edge and how you start driving automation to the far edge. That's where Ansible is just going to shine, no doubt in my mind.”

Lindquist noted that the automation space has been gaining more attention, citing rival VMware’s recent acquisition of SaltStack as an example. That deal, which was announced last month, provides VMware with automation that can be run through its infrastructure and entire application stack.

Further proof was shown earlier last month when Application development provider Progress acquired DevOps and automation platform provider Chef for $220 million. That deal brought to a close Chef’s more than 10-year run as an independent cook in the DevOps and automation space.