IT Automation Meshes – Craig Brandt, Red Hat

This is Textron TV. Hey guys. Thanks for the throw.

We're here with Craig Brantley who is technical marketing manager for the ansible business unit at Red Hat. That's about all right there. We're talking about automation meshes and hybrid clouds and what that all means Craig welcome the show.

Thank you very much for having me. I would say most people don't even know what an automation mesh is at this point. So maybe you just walk us through what exactly is that term we hear mesh a lot these days but what's an automation mesh we do and you know, that's that's a good points at a great question before I get to what automation Bish is specifically I just like to touch on the architecture of the ansible automation platform just so you get a good feel of where it fits in to the big impact bigger picture of the automation practice.

So what that we've done and this is really being based on the feedback we've received from our customers is we've reimagined the edible automation platform architecture to be more distributed to be more Cloud native and the feedback we've received from our customers is it needs to be able it must be easy? Excuse me to be able to scale our automation. So what we've done is we've created like I said a cloud native method of creating managing and scaling your automation.

So the analogy I like to use is a traffic system. So what we've done is we've used and Leverage What containers provide and what we've done is we've created something called execution environments. What they are is basically a container that has your automation your automation playbooks your ansible content with all the right dependencies.

You need the right versions of those dependencies and it's all bundle together. And what would the reason why we've done that is we want our customers to have a consistent experience. So throughout the automation life cycle you want to ensure that the content creator the way that he wanted to execute it is actually done.

So when you reaching the end points and what I like to consider those as is like delivery vehicles, Then we have the automation controller and automation controller is the control plane which has all the Enterprise features you need. So think about API think about tracing think about logging and think about role-based access control that is where you define and delegates how your automation actually runs within your organization. So to me, it sounds like the traffic lights that we have in a traffic system and the stop signs and the yield sign.

So it defines how you actually go. These delivery tracks will go across the highway and the highway being automation. Mesh and automation mesh is a consistent reliable flexible method that we use to deliver those containerized pieces of automation across the hybrid Cloud so multiple regions think remote offices think public Cloud take hybrid Cloud think age and technically that's where automation fits into the bigger picture.

But what Automation mesh itself. Well, technically what it is is a group of what we call worker nodes that have a dynamic peer to peer connection with each other basically an overlay Network that it dynamically builds over your existing Network. So in practice, what you would do is you would actually go and install and automation mesh node or co-located closer to the endpoints that actually need that automation.

So what that does is it localizes the automation execution. It brings a lot of advantages to technically if you localize the the actual execution you suddenly have more resilience to high latency networks. You have you certainly have more resilience to connection disruption.

So if you automate execution, you know, you want to make sure that it automates consistently completely and imagine a situation where you've ran a Automation than you never get feedback if it runs successfully or it's failed. So localizing that brings a lot of advantages to organizations above and beyond that think of that Dynamic peer-to-peer networking. Well that provides native resiliency into your asthma automation platform itself.

It also allows you to develop and design I mentioned flexible so you can create a topology of these different execution nodes for more constrained Network environments. So think of a DMZ where you might have security constraints well being able to put these Mission roads and collocate these Mission know it's really gives you the capability to ensure that you've got the security practices the find within one automation platform. It also because of this lovely overlay Network.

You can reach new areas within your organization and bring automation there. What you can do is you can actually create a series of worker nodes. That means that you can run your execution even though that mesh worker node is not directly connected to the automation control and that has got a lot of organizational benefits.

Oh lightweight. Is that worker known? I mean how far down at the edge?

Can I get that to automate and how distributed can I make that whole? She transitioned. Well, it's it also a really good question.

You know, what we are seeing with our customers is really the adoption of the hybrid Cloud experience or hybrid Cloud platform. So there's a proliferation of public Cloud adoption which we see in globally and there's also a lot of growth into the edge environment so What you can do with an execution. Also, this is better running on a red hat Enterprise Linux is you can go and bring this perhaps to the nearest right?

If you bring you can deliver the the types of automation you need. So if you think about automation these days automation is a little bit more. They're just streamlining a task, right?

It's become the delivery mechanism for security. It's become the delivery mechanism for regulation and complex. So it's the advantage that may provides as you can bring it a lot closer to the edge input.

So if you can run a role machine there you can bring the execution closer to those endpoints. Premier perspective what has been the challenge in achieving higher levels of automation. We still see a lot of scripts out there.

We see a lot of custom stuff. We see things that don't scale especially well, we've been talking about automation for a while. Now.

What's the ultimate Challenge here that people are finding difficult to overcome. Also a good question and it's it different markets and different Industries. I believe do have different challenges but pervasively some of the challenges that organization's face is they haven't they they automate in islands of automation.

So I'm pretty sure that most organizations even if they don't know it have some type of answerable running perhaps by an individual or within a team, but that's generally where it stays right is it's an individual use case which is just the team use case and you can't get the most out of your automation. If it's just running in those Silo pockets and the the difficulty or the complexity that organizations actually experience is the questions that need to ask is how do I Elevate that automation to be able to a bigger team? How do I extend that to a multiple team?

So you're getting more output from your automation Investments and And the the issue is there will be multiple platforms perhaps running in the organization or they won't have the Enterprise features that it needs. So all the automation needs to be around securely you need to have role-based access control. You need to have an API to integrate your other Enterprise systems and you need to be able to support have that supported and that's really where a platform you need a platform to do.

So and that's where the answer will automation platform can really help Elevate that because it's not just a single tool that's going to help an organization get there, but it's elevating the automation so it can tackle more deeper harder use cases that you can really leverage automation throughout the organization and also it needs to be easy to scale as as teams are adopting the cloud and the The Edge too. They can't wait for automation to get there. I use the example of Team that are starting a new project on a public Cloud now, they can't really wait for you to deliver the automation there, right?

They are going to go what they're gonna do is they gonna pull out their personal credit card and they get a swipe it and they're gonna start Shadow it which is could be very risky for the organization. So being able to deliver automation with velocities important and that's really one of the strengths of automation mesh because it's centrally managed to automation controller and it has a far less operational overhead involved to actually go and extend that automation to that team in the public cloud. Do you think that the current downturn in the economy will drive people to investigate Automation and scale more aggressively because frankly we're just short-handed everywhere.

And there's no Cavalry coming over the hill and I can't throw bodies at everything anymore. Absolutely correct automation is now an imperative a few years ago. You know automation was was perhaps just an option but it's it's become so much more to organization.

So as we experience the the pandemic with covid-19 suddenly you were you had different remote offices and people working remotely and you had security teams and infrastructure teams trying to cope with this, right. So automation has been the accelerated to be able to change into this more hybrid model of working itself, and it's important as well. You know, we talking about the, you know, the Staffing and retention of staff is something we hear from our customers, too.

is to retain stuff, you know, you need to give them the tools and the capabilities to to explore new more creative ways of delivering those services and that's really where automation can play a big role in this so as as we're trying to get more from what we do and amplify the subject matter experts that we have and the impact that they have on our business automation has become the vehicle to do so it seems to me at least that we have more platforms than ever the it environments more distributed than ever and developers are driving much of that because they'll pick the workload and the platform but None of people seem to be taken a minute to look at the total cost of that because every time I had a new platform, I gotta add a whole new IT team to manage it and get the specialist to deal with that. So are we on a path to maybe figuring out how to unify the management of all these Platforms in a way that might actually reduce the total cost of it that you know, nobody's talking about it, but it's the ugly little secret is then it gets more expensive every time you had a new cloud or a new Edge Computing, but absolutely correct and and you know, it's it's there's an organizational component to it too is you know, you you need your teams to be able to have the processes to work together. But what what's more Silo team to do is they investing in those those just those native tools the whole time and the more investment they have the more opportunity.

They're losing of actually getting the most out of their automation ready together. So you you need a more pervasive language like ansible. That can span all these different it regions.

You need a language that can be easily used and expanded when you adopting the public Cloud too. So it's a lot of from a cost perspective from understanding the business impact perspective. That's really the goal you're going to aim for is, you know, the the return on investment from your automation is directly related to how much volume you can push through your automation platform.

So elevating Appliance Centric type automation where you just working in a certain vendor or a certain domain such as just the networking you want to really extend above that and you want to start automating processes right linking to business objectives and you want to be able to link these all together into workflows, right and also being able to Define your compliance your regulations, you know policy is code is also a new topic. That's come that we starting to hear from Customers and elevating that into more of a process automation so that that's really where you're going to aim for as an organization. As we go along are we also going to converge functions and roles because we can use something like ansible to manage the infrastructure the networking certain parts of the application layer at the very least.

So what we see more for lack of a better phrase super administrators or super devops teams capable of managing more up and down the stack rather than having a horizontal specialist for every little thing. You we are getting to that point of what we are seeing is the the services or the the domain skills or something that you know is usually very Niche or specific to that that specific domain itself. So you'll have the networking expert over the Security Experts.

You'll have people trying to bring this all together in a devops practice and what what we really need to try and do in trying to aim for is being able to codify those expertise in a method that is shareable across the different teams, too. So everybody can take advantage of it is complex and it's it's by no mistake of anybody that there's there's a niche domain right? It's very complex.

So you can become an expert in perhaps one or two of these donates. What automation does at what using ads for automation platform provides. Is that capability to actually codif Your services and you know, you mentioned devops you want to be able to present those services in a self-service manner with the compliance built-in with the regulations built-in that provide that that's going to make it a lot smoother to deliver the services perhaps through a cicd pipeline and we're measures really cool with this too is if you look at the investment of time effort people skills that you put into a devops practice ansible automation platform, the language itself and the capabilities of mesh and delivering the services to new remote areas into the edge into the public Cloud really expands and amplifies the benefits you can get from your devops Investments.

All right folks here to here first. The automation is a good thing. Islands of automation across a lot of diverse different platforms not so much.

Hey Greg. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you very much.

All right back to you guys in the studio.