Red Hat introduces 'policy as code' for Ansible

So, for any organization looking to leverage AI, automation is mission-critical, he says.

Say, for example, a company is using the AI-powered Ansible Lightspeed service to accelerate automation development. If “policy as code” is infused from the start, content creators can write code that automatically maintains mandated compliance requirements, he says, “greatly reducing the impact of skills gaps and human error in IT operations.”

At British banking and insurance company NatWest Group, for example, adding policy capability to automation will allow for increased compliance and adherence to regulations, says Baljinder Kang, the company’s director of enterprise engineering, in a statement. “We think this is necessary as we look to add AI capabilities to continue to enhance our tooling to drive increased value in our solutions to meet our customer needs,” he says.

The big public clouds – hyperscalers like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform – are also moving in the direction of policy as code, says IDC analyst Stephen Elliot.

“They have lots of point tools,” Elliot says. “Typically, customers tell us that they have Cloud Watch, they have CloudTrail, they have AWS Systems Manager. The tools are either free or almost free. They’re good enough, cheap enough. They need them for visibility into the AWS environment.”

But once enterprises move outside of a particular cloud, they need to use other tools, such as Ansible or Terraform. “Red Hat is all about supporting all the clouds,” Elliot says. “Ansible is all about automating things across all the clouds — part of the value is multi-cloud support. Most of the public cloud providers only care about their own cloud, and for very good reasons.”