Enterprise IT automation service Ansible today announced that it’s partnering with HP, RackSpace, CSC, Cisco and the open source community to help make deploying and managing OpenStack clouds easier. While the open source cloud computing platform is now extremely powerful, few of its users would argue that it is very easy to stand up an OpenStack cloud. The platform, after all, relies on numerous different components and they have to work together seamlessly for it to work right. Ansible already offers some services to manage OpenStack clouds, but it is now working with these partners to make the process much simpler.
The so-called “Simple OpenStack Initiative” aims to improve Ansible’s existing OpenStack modules , as well as other OpenStack-related projects, in order to make it easier for IT to work with the project. All of this will flow into Ansible’s open source platform and its commercial Ansible Tower service (which is basically a UI for Ansible). In many ways, Ansible is already a de facto standard for configuring and orchestrating OpenStack clouds, but it obviously also has competition in tools like Puppet and Canonical’s MAAS and Juju tools (depending on the kind of cloud you want to set up, of course). Given how complex OpenStack is, though, a bit of competition here is surely not going to hurt anyone and may just help push the ecosystem forward.
