​Red Hat open sources Ansible Galaxy for all

Linux giant Red Hat wants to be a cloud power, but it's not giving up on its open-source roots. So, it should come as no surprise that it's open-sourcing its Ansible DevOps program's Galaxy code repository.

Ansible Galaxy is the community hub for sharing Ansible Roles. Ansible Roles are pre-packaged, ready-to-run sysadmin tasks. Say, for example, you want to set up the Nginix web server on your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora, or Ubuntu servers in a cloud. Instead of doing it by hand, you simply use the open-source Ansible Ngnix role. No fuss, no muss.

To be precise, Ansible Roles are content directories that are structured to enable simple reuse, refactoring, and sharing of processes. They're also highly portable across teams, organizations, and environments. Ansible Roles act as the "common language" of Ansible functionality and may include variables, handlers, files, templates, tasks. and modules.

Ansible Galaxy gives you an open-source Ansible Roles repository. Besides using Red Hat's public Galaxy, you can can set up your private Galaxy server. With it, you can use the native Ansible Galaxy client with your own private Galaxy repository. Your developers and system administrators can also submit new features and enhancements directly to the Ansible Galaxy codebase.

As Tim Cramer, Red Hat's head of Ansible engineering, said in a statement: "Open source communities are where innovation happens. The Ansible community is thriving, and Red Hat hopes that by open sourcing the Ansible Galaxy code repository, we will be able to advance open source automation technology, and specifically Ansible Galaxy, in new and interesting ways."

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