Red Hat Buys Ansible, openSUSE Leap Review
The big news today was Red Hat's acquisition of cloud automation specialist Ansible. Ansible is located just up the road from Red Hat and was started by former Red Hat employees. In other news, Jamie Watson reported on openSUSE Leap 42.1 progress.
Red Hat today announced the purchase of Ansible, a software firm described as "a provider of powerful IT automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT." It helps users deploy cloud and hybrid-cloud environments and networks on Linux and Unix-based systems. Red Hat's announcement said no special coding skills are need to use Ansible, which is one of the reason it's one of the most popular automation tools on Github. Ansible will help Red Hat customers to:
* Deploy and manage applications across private and public clouds
* Speed service delivery through DevOps initiatives.
* Streamline OpenStack installations and upgrades.
* Accelerate container adoption by simplifying orchestration and configuration.
Joe Fitzgerald, a Red Hat VP, was quoted as saying Red Hat and Ansible's products are already being integrated by customers, so this acquisition is a logical next step. Red Hat said they plan to keep the Durham office open to retain the current 50 employees and expects to hire "probably 30 to 50" additional in the coming year. Two of Ansible's co-founders, Saïd Ziouani and Todd Barrare, are former Red Hat employees who saw the need for easier deployment of cloud technology. At the time of the sale Ansible enjoyed 500 customers, some from Fortune 50 companies. Current contracts will be honored and Red Hat hopes to expand the list of customers and partners. While the terms of the deal remain private, some are reporting the figure $100 million. Red Hat stock began climbing yesterday on rumors of the acquisition, but remained fairly steady today after the announcement possibly due to the increase in operating costs expected over the next two quarters. The stock closed the week out at $77.52
openSUSE Leap 42.1 RC1 was released yesterday and Jamie Watson took it out for a test drive. He said that while some are concerned over the merger of SUSE and openSUSE into Leap:
So far I haven't seen anything unusual or out of the ordinary for openSuSE development. The development itself, and the versions of the Linux kernel and other packages, has been typical for an openSuSE release cycle. The kernel in RC1 is 4.1.10, the KDE desktop is Plasma version 5.4.2, Firefox is 41.0.1, and so on. Overall functionality also seems to be good. On most of the systems I have, Leap installs and runs, and supports all of the hardware with no problem.
Watson walked readers through the install process and offers more observations, so be sure to check that out.
Elsewhere:
* Ubuntu delays PC-phone convergence as Microsoft's Windows 10 forges ahead