Red Hat has announced that the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is now on Microsoft Azure.

The collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft delivers a robust solution that Red Hat says gives customers flexibility in adopting automation to deliver any application, anywhere, without additional overhead or complexity.

"Combined, the power of cloud computing and the convenience of a managed offering allow IT organisations to quickly automate and scale in their cloud," the company says.

"Red Hat and Microsoft customers don't have to worry about deploying and configuring a solution that can address enterprise-class use cases. Instead, they can start working immediately on complex scenarios like automated OS configuration, application provisioning, network automation, infrastructure as code (IaC) and security orchestration."

A recent IDC report found that 97% of organisations see significant barriers to their ability to employ automation across their enterprise effectively. The report says that by 2023, many IT automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in creating IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools and skills.

Red Hat says its Ansible Automation Platform on Azure helps IT organisations perform these tasks at scale while minimising user error. The integration with Azure services, including Azure compute, means network and storage can further increase the ROI of automation, allowing customers to scale their IT operations.

"The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure enables enterprise IT teams to achieve greater scale, speed and standardisation with automation practices for their hybrid cloud," says Red Hat.

"This helps to remove the infrastructure maintenance, and operational burden from IT teams, enabling them to focus purely on delivering automation strategies for a more efficient, flexible, and scalable business."

"We believe that this is the decade of automation," says Red Hat VP and general manager, Ansible Business Unit, Joe Fitzgerald.

"Just like in other domains, from manufacturing to logistics, automation is the one technology that enables the operational scalability necessary to build and operate at hybrid cloud-scale. Customers around the globe are realising this and are exploring many options. But the automation needs of any organisation go well beyond simply creating and destroying workloads or infrastructure," he says.

"If you're in any operation team focused on continuous IT governance, automated infrastructure provisioning alone will not be enough. Ansible Automation Platform gives DevOps and ITOps the ability to automate and govern, at scale, every aspect of the application lifecycle. But it also gives NetOps, SecOps, and FinOps the ability to automate the multitude of tasks that need executing irrespective of application delivery."
 
Erin Chapple, corporate VP at Microsoft Azure Core Products and Design, says by integrating open source automation technologies, such as Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Microsoft Azure, customers can better automate at scale, evolve current practices and implement a culture of automation to meet future business needs.

"Our continued collaboration with Red Hat makes innovation as attainable and efficient as possible for customers."

Red Hat says customers interested in a private preview of the new Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform on Azure can sign up now.