7 ms·

Why Red Hat Acquired Ansible

194 points by anacleto 11y ago

notacoward 11y ago
I wonder how much F5 paid for that mention in the "why Ansible" section. Maybe I shouldn't, maybe it was a genuinely spontaneous example, but product positioning has become so ubiquitous that I can't help it.
- nailer 11y ago
  It (and the Cisco and Microsoft mentions) might be a case of Red Hat showing that Ansible can configure what their customers use. As web developers, we have haproxy and nginx for load balancers, but at financial firms 'F5' is synonymous with the term. Disclosure: used to work at Red Hat.
  - geerlingguy 11y ago
    Not only financial firms, but many places with a little more of the CYA mentality—think medical providers, other large enterprises, etc. Nobody gets fired for recommending a vendor-backed hardware balancer/firewall solution.
  - exelius 11y ago
    A lot of larger companies use commercial load balancing appliances (A10 / F5) to provide a stable / secure implementation pipeline for SSL sites across multiple datacenters. Nginx/HAproxy are great if you're a developer (and in fact, many developers at these companies will use one of those behind an appliance) but they kind of suck if you're trying to manage SSL certificates across a few thousand domains load balanced in 2-3 datacenters with round-robin IPs. Also, the throughput on commercial load balancer appliances is crazy high, and there are plugins for injecting various headers, doing geographic load balancing, etc. Once you get into the high-traffic side of load balancing, your load balancer platform is also running your DNS -- so it can dole out the right IP address (with a short TTL, naturally) based on your proximity to specific exit nodes. It's nice to be able to manage all that from one platform if you're supporting several dozen sites / applications.
- karavelov 11y ago
  They also mention the Citrix NetScaler further below that is a competing product to the F-5, so I guess they where not paid anything.
shadeless 11y ago
I hope that mpdehaan2 is getting a good chunk from that sale, he really deserved it. He not only made it and built a community but he was very active in the discussions on HN, blog & Gist comments etc. Even though I'm looking forward to using NixOps/GuixOps, I'm a very happy Ansible user both in personal projects and in the company I'm working for.
- tomaac 11y ago
  I really would like to hear his opinion about this. Is this how he imagined Ansible when he started this project?
  - mpdehaan2 11y ago
    Hi! Thanks for the nice words, folks! Wasn't thinking of saying much but I'll chime in just once. Was it what I expected when I started? nah, I remember when I thought having a IRC channel with 30 people was crazy-insanely huge, it took off at completely unexpected rates. Just to get some early looks at it from Seth Vidal and Jeremy Katz (and a commit or two!) was awesome enough for me at the time. It wasn't engineered with the idea that it would be a business at that point at all. BTW, extremly huge thanks for this really should also go to all the contributors out there and people that helped spread ansible around, that was completely unpredictable and a lot of fun watching it take off, especially stuff like seeing so many AM tweets in Japanese and then trying to translate them, or seeing someone automate random vending machines or electronics projects. This got built trying to help people like you, so a huge thanks for all of the input and help! Anyway, those words mean a lot, and I greatly appreciate them.
    - smacktoward 11y ago
      Here's one more big thank-you to you and everyone else who made Ansible what it is: excellent. Congratulations!
    - tomaac 11y ago
      Thanks and congrats! I have been using Ansible since version 0.2 when there were like 5 modules. Since then I have introduced and promoted it to every company I have been working for. Well done!
pm90 11y ago
I feel somewhat pleased that they mention the "Hacker News" community :)
- geerlingguy 11y ago
  Specifically: http://dberkholz-media.redmonk.com/dberkholz/files/2015/04/hacker_news_all.png http://dberkholz-media.redmonk.com/dberkholz/files/2015/04/h... (Graph of mentions of popular CM/orchestration tools on HN.)
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  Last week at Amazon re:Invent, the HN community was also mentioned in one of the keynote speeches.
miles932 11y ago
Congrats to the unmitigated badasses on the Ansible team! You know who you be!
- afandian 11y ago
  I went to the Ansible conference in London last year. We were looking into whether or not to use Ansible, thinking that going to the conference would shed some light. To be honest, we were put off by the (I use this word advisedly) fanboyism. There was a huge amount of "Ansible is amazing!" and (in my opinion) not much actual substance. It felt like there was lots of back-slapping. Toward the end of the day there was a presentation which presented features (possibly new ones) demonstrating how they were contorting (presumably declarative) YAML into a new programming language with control structures (and templating, my memory is hazy). It felt like "our deployment scripts were over-complicated so we took out the complexity and put it in a declarative non-executable format. Then we had to put the features back because we needed them after all, except now it's in new less powerful language". Anyway, the conference was informative, but probably not in the way intended. That said, if you can give some substantial reasons why to use Ansible, it would be great to hear them.
  - eropple 11y ago
    This is pretty much where I'm at. By the time you bolt back in everything that Ansible removes "for simplicity" because you realize that, hey, you stepped on that rake and would like to not step on it again, you've more or less reinvented Chef with YAML (I forget who around here called YAML the new S-expressions, but it's uncomfortably true) instead of a usable programming language as your DSL. The overwhelming volume of the community (edit: I called them "fanboys" before, and that's not fair; I think they're unreasonable but I'm not in their heads) makes me wonder at times whether or not it's trying to ignore picking the slower horse by being really enthusiastic about it. My current client paid me to drop Ansible and rewrite the experimental Ansible service in Chef, and it's under half the lines of committed code in our repo and they don't have to deal with the bogus state of Ansible dependency management.
  - chucky_z 11y ago
agentgt 11y ago
I have a feeling the reasons listed in that posting hardly even come close to the primary real reasons why the acquisition happened. What the real reasons are I'm not sure entirely but I'm fairly certain its some what Red Hat getting some talented people back and Red Hat giving money back to its friends and family (much of Ansible's talent formerly worked at Red Hat).
geerlingguy 11y ago
Also see the FAQ, which answers (more or less) many of the questions that have popped up in these threads: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ansible http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ans...
zimbatm 11y ago
The biggest question is: is Red Hat going to release Tower as open-source ? Red Hat is an open-source company and I would expect them to do so but they didn't even mention Tower. EDIT: From their FAQ[0] it's not clear either. It seems to be pointing towards no. > Red Hat plans to continue to develop, sell and support Ansible and Ansible Tower. [0]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ansible https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-an...
- eLobato 11y ago
  Red Hatter here. We have open sourced all acquisitions, I don't know what exactly leads you to think it won't be open sourced, the FAQ just states there'll be a timeline, as it was the case previously for ManageIQ (manageiq.org)
- ghaff 11y ago
  Read further down the FAQ: Q. Will Red Hat open source all of Ansible's technology? Most of Ansible is already open source today. Red Hat has long shown its commitment to open-sourcing the technology it acquires, and we have no reason to expect a change in this approach. Our specific plans and timeline will be determined over the coming months.
- leetrout 11y ago
  It's actually not as great as they make it sound. It would awesome if they open source it so more features can be added. As it stands today it is grossly overpriced for what it does (and how it does it)
- rodgerd 11y ago
  They've aquired and freed (that I know of): RHEV (originally Qumranet, upstream is oVirt), ManageIQ (aquisition, upstream is ManageIQ, commercial is CloudForms), and are in the process of open sourcing the Ceph commercial management tools. Red Hat are the anti-Oracle.
jgrowl 11y ago
Congrats to all. I love ansible.
LordKano 11y ago
You mean, it's not to take the lead in the fight against the Formics?
- tedks 11y ago
  I've downvoted you because you've referenced a fictional work by Orson Scott Card, a known homophobe. Please try to keep HN tolerant of diversity so we can all work together to break the image of tech as some cisheteronormative boys club.
  - teach 11y ago
    It sounds like you're the intolerant one.
    - LordKano 11y ago
      I can play that game too. I may be a CIS hetero male but the REAL reason he downvoted me is because I'm black, making him a racist.
scardine 11y ago
The project name is also excellent, Ender's Game is among my favorite books.
- 100k 11y ago
  Orson Scott Card borrowed the name from Ursula K, LeGuin. You should check out The Dispossesed (about the inventor of the ansible). It's a great book.
elktea 11y ago
I like and use Ansible, but unfortunately I have always found the quality of the 3rd party software playbook (both on Galaxy and elsewhere) is not nearly as professional or comprehensive as equivalent Puppet or Chef ones. Hopefully people invest more time into this side of things now Red Hat is involved.
kallus 11y ago
How does it work when an open source project is acquired? What's the benefit for RH compared to just forking the project? I guess the choice of license can get really important in this situation? Are there any old decisions by the founder that now turn out to be especially important?
kasramoradi_66 11y ago
very nice
kasramoradi_66 11y ago
kheyli ali bod

194 points by anacleto 11y ago

I wonder how much F5 paid for that mention in the "why Ansible" section. Maybe I shouldn't, maybe it was a genuinely spontaneous example, but product positioning has become so ubiquitous that I can't help it.

nailer 11y ago
It (and the Cisco and Microsoft mentions) might be a case of Red Hat showing that Ansible can configure what their customers use. As web developers, we have haproxy and nginx for load balancers, but at financial firms 'F5' is synonymous with the term. Disclosure: used to work at Red Hat.
- geerlingguy 11y ago
  Not only financial firms, but many places with a little more of the CYA mentality—think medical providers, other large enterprises, etc. Nobody gets fired for recommending a vendor-backed hardware balancer/firewall solution.
- exelius 11y ago
  A lot of larger companies use commercial load balancing appliances (A10 / F5) to provide a stable / secure implementation pipeline for SSL sites across multiple datacenters. Nginx/HAproxy are great if you're a developer (and in fact, many developers at these companies will use one of those behind an appliance) but they kind of suck if you're trying to manage SSL certificates across a few thousand domains load balanced in 2-3 datacenters with round-robin IPs. Also, the throughput on commercial load balancer appliances is crazy high, and there are plugins for injecting various headers, doing geographic load balancing, etc. Once you get into the high-traffic side of load balancing, your load balancer platform is also running your DNS -- so it can dole out the right IP address (with a short TTL, naturally) based on your proximity to specific exit nodes. It's nice to be able to manage all that from one platform if you're supporting several dozen sites / applications.
karavelov 11y ago
They also mention the Citrix NetScaler further below that is a competing product to the F-5, so I guess they where not paid anything.

shadeless 11y ago

I hope that mpdehaan2 is getting a good chunk from that sale, he really deserved it. He not only made it and built a community but he was very active in the discussions on HN, blog & Gist comments etc. Even though I'm looking forward to using NixOps/GuixOps, I'm a very happy Ansible user both in personal projects and in the company I'm working for.

tomaac 11y ago
I really would like to hear his opinion about this. Is this how he imagined Ansible when he started this project?
- mpdehaan2 11y ago
  Hi! Thanks for the nice words, folks! Wasn't thinking of saying much but I'll chime in just once. Was it what I expected when I started? nah, I remember when I thought having a IRC channel with 30 people was crazy-insanely huge, it took off at completely unexpected rates. Just to get some early looks at it from Seth Vidal and Jeremy Katz (and a commit or two!) was awesome enough for me at the time. It wasn't engineered with the idea that it would be a business at that point at all. BTW, extremly huge thanks for this really should also go to all the contributors out there and people that helped spread ansible around, that was completely unpredictable and a lot of fun watching it take off, especially stuff like seeing so many AM tweets in Japanese and then trying to translate them, or seeing someone automate random vending machines or electronics projects. This got built trying to help people like you, so a huge thanks for all of the input and help! Anyway, those words mean a lot, and I greatly appreciate them.
  - smacktoward 11y ago
    Here's one more big thank-you to you and everyone else who made Ansible what it is: excellent. Congratulations!
  - tomaac 11y ago
    Thanks and congrats! I have been using Ansible since version 0.2 when there were like 5 modules. Since then I have introduced and promoted it to every company I have been working for. Well done!

pm90 11y ago

I feel somewhat pleased that they mention the "Hacker News" community :)

geerlingguy 11y ago
Specifically: http://dberkholz-media.redmonk.com/dberkholz/files/2015/04/hacker_news_all.png http://dberkholz-media.redmonk.com/dberkholz/files/2015/04/h... (Graph of mentions of popular CM/orchestration tools on HN.)
CWuestefeld 11y ago
Last week at Amazon re:Invent, the HN community was also mentioned in one of the keynote speeches.

miles932 11y ago

Congrats to the unmitigated badasses on the Ansible team! You know who you be!

afandian 11y ago
I went to the Ansible conference in London last year. We were looking into whether or not to use Ansible, thinking that going to the conference would shed some light. To be honest, we were put off by the (I use this word advisedly) fanboyism. There was a huge amount of "Ansible is amazing!" and (in my opinion) not much actual substance. It felt like there was lots of back-slapping. Toward the end of the day there was a presentation which presented features (possibly new ones) demonstrating how they were contorting (presumably declarative) YAML into a new programming language with control structures (and templating, my memory is hazy). It felt like "our deployment scripts were over-complicated so we took out the complexity and put it in a declarative non-executable format. Then we had to put the features back because we needed them after all, except now it's in new less powerful language". Anyway, the conference was informative, but probably not in the way intended. That said, if you can give some substantial reasons why to use Ansible, it would be great to hear them.
- eropple 11y ago
  This is pretty much where I'm at. By the time you bolt back in everything that Ansible removes "for simplicity" because you realize that, hey, you stepped on that rake and would like to not step on it again, you've more or less reinvented Chef with YAML (I forget who around here called YAML the new S-expressions, but it's uncomfortably true) instead of a usable programming language as your DSL. The overwhelming volume of the community (edit: I called them "fanboys" before, and that's not fair; I think they're unreasonable but I'm not in their heads) makes me wonder at times whether or not it's trying to ignore picking the slower horse by being really enthusiastic about it. My current client paid me to drop Ansible and rewrite the experimental Ansible service in Chef, and it's under half the lines of committed code in our repo and they don't have to deal with the bogus state of Ansible dependency management.
- chucky_z 11y ago

agentgt 11y ago

I have a feeling the reasons listed in that posting hardly even come close to the primary real reasons why the acquisition happened. What the real reasons are I'm not sure entirely but I'm fairly certain its some what Red Hat getting some talented people back and Red Hat giving money back to its friends and family (much of Ansible's talent formerly worked at Red Hat).

geerlingguy 11y ago

Also see the FAQ, which answers (more or less) many of the questions that have popped up in these threads: http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ansible http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ans...

zimbatm 11y ago

The biggest question is: is Red Hat going to release Tower as open-source ? Red Hat is an open-source company and I would expect them to do so but they didn't even mention Tower. EDIT: From their FAQ[0] it's not clear either. It seems to be pointing towards no. > Red Hat plans to continue to develop, sell and support Ansible and Ansible Tower. [0]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-ansible https://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/faq-red-hat-acquires-an...

eLobato 11y ago
Red Hatter here. We have open sourced all acquisitions, I don't know what exactly leads you to think it won't be open sourced, the FAQ just states there'll be a timeline, as it was the case previously for ManageIQ (manageiq.org)
ghaff 11y ago
Read further down the FAQ: Q. Will Red Hat open source all of Ansible's technology? Most of Ansible is already open source today. Red Hat has long shown its commitment to open-sourcing the technology it acquires, and we have no reason to expect a change in this approach. Our specific plans and timeline will be determined over the coming months.
leetrout 11y ago
It's actually not as great as they make it sound. It would awesome if they open source it so more features can be added. As it stands today it is grossly overpriced for what it does (and how it does it)
rodgerd 11y ago
They've aquired and freed (that I know of): RHEV (originally Qumranet, upstream is oVirt), ManageIQ (aquisition, upstream is ManageIQ, commercial is CloudForms), and are in the process of open sourcing the Ceph commercial management tools. Red Hat are the anti-Oracle.

jgrowl 11y ago

Congrats to all. I love ansible.

LordKano 11y ago

You mean, it's not to take the lead in the fight against the Formics?

tedks 11y ago
I've downvoted you because you've referenced a fictional work by Orson Scott Card, a known homophobe. Please try to keep HN tolerant of diversity so we can all work together to break the image of tech as some cisheteronormative boys club.
- teach 11y ago
  It sounds like you're the intolerant one.
  - LordKano 11y ago
    I can play that game too. I may be a CIS hetero male but the REAL reason he downvoted me is because I'm black, making him a racist.

scardine 11y ago

The project name is also excellent, Ender's Game is among my favorite books.

100k 11y ago
Orson Scott Card borrowed the name from Ursula K, LeGuin. You should check out The Dispossesed (about the inventor of the ansible). It's a great book.

elktea 11y ago

I like and use Ansible, but unfortunately I have always found the quality of the 3rd party software playbook (both on Galaxy and elsewhere) is not nearly as professional or comprehensive as equivalent Puppet or Chef ones. Hopefully people invest more time into this side of things now Red Hat is involved.

kallus 11y ago

How does it work when an open source project is acquired? What's the benefit for RH compared to just forking the project? I guess the choice of license can get really important in this situation? Are there any old decisions by the founder that now turn out to be especially important?

kasramoradi_66 11y ago

very nice

kasramoradi_66 11y ago

kheyli ali bod