Red Hat Inc. added another vital piece to its hybrid cloud puzzle this morning after announcing the acquisition of Ansible Inc., one of the biggest names in open-source infrastructure automation, for a reported $100 million. The hefty price tag reflects the immense strategic value of the technology exchanging hands.

The two-year-old startup’s namesake configuration management software allows administrators to have settings and updates applied to a new node as soon as it’s brought online without having to manually set up everything from scratch. That’s a major time saver for large organizations with upwards of thousands of virtual machines spread out across different kinds of infrastructure.

The potential for overhead reduction grows even bigger in the use cases that Red Hat is targeting with its distribution of OpenStack, which is notoriously difficult to manage even by the standards of corporate data centers. And to make life even harder for administrators, on-premise deployments of the framework are often coupled with remote resources from the public cloud.

The result is an environment spanning several geographical locations and often nearly as many different management paradigms. if not more. That adds up to a monumental administrative challenge that the acquisition of Ansible will enable Red Hat to address in a single toolchain once its technology has been fully integrated into its portfolio.

Customers will be able to provision new nodes using the Linux distributor’s homegrown Satellite lifecycle management software, configure those nodes with Ansible and manage the high-level architecture of the environment through the Red Hat Cloudforms platform. That end-to-end value proposition could go a long way towards simplifying the management of hybrid environments and OpenStack in particular, thus lowering one of its main adoption barriers.

The reason why Red Hat chose Ansible to provide the operational glue for its offering over the other major open-source configuration management providers out there is mostly a practical one.  The startup’s two larger rivals, Puppet Labs Inc. and Chef Inc., both boast a bigger market share and more outside funding than its humble $6 million, which would have made an acquisition that much pricier.

Meanwhile, smaller contenders like SaltStack Inc. generally have a steeper learning curve than Ansible, which makes its software a better fit with Red Hat’s plans to simplify the management of hybrid clouds running its OpenStack distribution. And as an added bonus, the startup’s headquarters are located about 25 miles from the Linux distributor’s, which should make integrating the acquisition easier from an organizational standpoint as well.

The purchase is set to complete later this month, adding an estimated $2 million to Red Hat’s quarterly running costs.  Given the fact that Ansible’s commercial version of its software is used at over 300 major organizations, however, the company will likely have little trouble making back the added expenses over time.

Image via Geralt