In February, at ConfigManagementCamp, we laid out our vision for the things we need to improve on in the Ansible community. Let’s discuss how that’s going!

At CfgMgmtCamp we laid out the data & reasoning for how we see the state of the community. That was then written up as a set of blog posts around the community strategy, taking in fragmentation, voice, mission, and more.

That lead to a pair of discussions and votes within the community, on the need for a community website and a community forum, both of which were voted for. So let’s take stock of where we’re at today, what the current data looks like, and how the rollout of that strategy is going. Expect graphs, demos, and discussion!

This talk is aimed at everyone in the Ansible community, from the newest user to the most veteran of contributor. If you have an interest in where the community goes next, we want to hear about your thoughts, and this talk with give you the baseline of how we see things in the Community Team.

Greg Sutcliffe

• Community Architect & Data Scientist for Ansible
• Work for Red Hat
• 20 years in open source
• Also likes gaming, 3d printing, cooking, & walking

Always happy to talk about community data, governance, and the psychology of online groups!

Pronouns: He/Him Matrix/IRC ID: @gwmngilfen:ansible.im GitHub ID: GregSutcliffe

The Good Practices for Ansible (GPA) is a worldwide initiative by the Red Hat Automation Community of Practice. Many hours of automation experts from different Red Hat organizations have flown into it. And all this massive experience is open to use by anybody.

We want to show you what the Good Practices for Ansible (GPA) is, where it comes from, and how to use it for your purposes. We’ll also go through a few examples of documented good practices. And finally it would be open if you couldn’t participate.

Eric Lavarde - Consulting Architect specialized in Platform and Cloud Management solutions, with a very strong focus on Ansible automation. I’m also Automation Community of Practice Manager within Red Hat. You may address me in English, French or German.

Moritz Schönwetter - I help clients with the implementation details and architectural decisions based on Red Hat’s automation portfolio, and I am also experienced in introducing IaC, DevOps and CI/CD methodologies and mindsets in client teams. As a side job, I’m an Automation Community of Practice Manager.

Upgrade AWX/Tower/Controller, and its community projects associated with it smarter! Ivan & Silvio from Red Hat introduce agile migration using a community project. Learn efficient configuration management & GitOps adoption.

Discover a revolutionary approach to upgrading and managing your automation environments! Join us, Ivan and Silvio from Red Hat, as we unveil an innovative solution that will transform the way you handle upgrades, migrations, and configuration management. Are you tired of the traditional upgrade process that requires meticulous consideration of each version’s specifics? Have you ever wished for an update process that doesn’t just replicate the past but adds value to your new environment? Look no further! In this engaging presentation, we’ll introduce you to a game-changing community project that redefines how you approach automation environment upgrades. Imagine a world where migrating between remote versions of AWX, Ansible Tower, or Controller becomes seamless and efficient. You don’t need to be held back by cumbersome methodologies during your updates. Instead, embrace a new era of automation management that’s flexible, portable, and reusable. Our approach is more than just a technical solution – it’s a mindset shift. Through the adoption of agile work methodologies, we’ll guide you on how to migrate and manage your AWX, Ansible Tower, or Controller configurations with unparalleled ease. Say goodbye to traditional methods and welcome the future of automation configuration management. But that’s not all – we’ll take it a step further. We’ll unveil how you can leverage the power of a Configuration-as-Code (CaC) approach, revolutionizing the way you handle your AWX/Ansible Tower or Controller configurations and settings. The CaC approach opens the door to adopting a GitOps methodology, enhancing your automation workflow and efficiency. Join us for this enlightening session and embark on a journey to a new world of automation management. Say hello to streamlined upgrades, efficient migrations, and a configuration management approach that empowers you to be in control like never before. Don’t miss out – let’s pave the way to a brighter, more agile future together.

Silvio Perez Torres - Silvio is an IT freak who loves to deploy free software and open source technologies in small home projects. He is a Cloud and Automation Architect at Red Hat.

Ivan Aragones - Ivan is a fan of automation applied to everything and of sharing acquired knowledge. Serves as a consultant at Red Hat and enjoys mountain biking during free time.

Adonis García Castro

Did you know Steampunk Spotter goes beyond analyzing and improving private Ansible Playbooks? This powerful playbook scanning tool can also scan public playbooks and provide fixes for PR/MR. In our session, we’ll show how to use Spotter to enhance Ansible content and open source projects.

Did you know Steampunk Spotter not only analyzes and enhances your Ansible Playbooks, but this powerful tool can also scan public playbooks and provide fixes that you can include when opening new pull/merge requests for open-source repositories? Join our talk to explore how our team uses Spotter to validate popular open source Ansible Playbooks like Ansible Lockdown and COP best practices, and propose fixes to help improve Ansible content and open source projects.

In the sessions, you will:

• Discover how the Ansible community and open source projects can benefit from Steampunk Spotter.
• Learn how to scan open source projects with Steampunk Spotter to improve Ansible content.
• See how to incorporate Steampunk Spotter in CI/CD pipelines (along with Ansible Lint) and integrate it within your IDE.

Anže Luzar - Anže Luzar is a DevSecOps engineer and Ansible expert, who believes that automation and orchestration make our lives happier. He actively participates in the development of tools for writing high-quality Ansible playbooks. Dribbling is his middle name, not just with the ball on the soccer field, but also to overcome all the bugs that get in his way.

Nejc Slabe - Nejc Slabe is a DevOps engineer with experience in Ansible, Kubernetes, networking, and security infrastructure. He began his automation journey with a simple idea to automate his infrastructure management pains, which started his adventure of automating everything that can be automated. Now he can’t wait to help others do the same.

Building a stable Ansible environment can be a challenge. We’ll focus on a network automation case: deploying an EVPN fabric with arista.avd collection inside a Devcontainer. The improved user experience can be extended to other Ansible collections and use cases. This session includes a demo.

This session will cover following topics:

• Ansible AVD collection overview
• Common challenges when building Ansible environment for network automation
• Why devcontainers?
• Pre-building a devcontainer with arista.avd, docker-in-docker and Containerlab using Github devcontainers/ci@v0.3 action.
• How to run the container on any machine (with docker run or as devcontainer) or Github Codespaces

There will be a reference Github repository provided with the slides in Marp, the demo and CI.

Audience Level: Intermediate

Petr Ankudinov

$ whoami

• Advanced Services Engineer at Arista Networks, Germany
• Over 20 years of experience in IT with a bit of everything
• Passionate DC and network automation engineer
• Daily (and nightly) user of Ansible, VSCode and more

Github account: ankudinov (Petr Ankudinov) · GitHub

Patrick Mathy

Elevate your skills! The Ansible Pilot Community empowers IT pros in Automation, DevOps, and Cloud to master Ansible, transforming daily tasks into automated victories.

In this presentation, I empower creative professionals in Automation, DevOps, Cloud Engineering, System Administration, and IT to excel with Ansible Technology, enabling them to automate more efficiently day by day. Join me as I share intriguing insights, accolades, behind-the-scenes stories, and valuable lessons learned from establishing the Ansible Pilot Community. Discover the journey to success through Ansible automation and how I published the Ansible for VMware by Examples and Ansible for Kubernetes by Examples best-seller of the Ansible By Example(s) practical book series.

Luca Berton - Luca Berton is an Ansible Automation Expert who has been working with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and previously worked with the Red Hat Hat Ansible Engineer Team for three years. Published author of the Ansible for VMware by Examples and Ansible for Kubernetes by Examples best-seller of the Ansible By Example(s) practical book series and creator of the Ansible Pilot project. With over 15 years of experience as a System Administrator, he has strong expertise in Infrastructure Hardening and Automation. Enthusiast of the Open Source supports the community, sharing his knowledge in different public access events. Geek by nature, Linux by choice, Fedora, of course.

Ansible is all about simple IT automation, unless it isn’t.

Sometimes, you really need to walk the extra mile to make something work with Ansible. Let’s investigate some of these situations and how you can approach them. You might think of rollbacks, nested loops or side effect handling.

With Ansible it is easy to work on “on time automation” for simple tasks. Sometimes, you will run into issues where nested looping is needed, boolean is not properly tested and side effects occur. These issues can cost a lot of time and cause frustration.

In the talk, I want to tackle some issues (within Ansible) you will face in smaller and larger setups. I will also demonstrate how I solved them and invite you to propose your solutions. Therefore, we will work on the below issues in a somewhat interactive format.

Topics

• side effect handling
• rollbacks with Ansible
• nested loops/jobs
• make dry-runs work
• doing handlers right
• testing kernel settings

Audience Level: Intermediate

Daniel Schier - My Name is Daniel, I am an Ansible enthusiast and FOSS evangelist. In my daytime job, I am seeing myself as an IT craftsman, nowadays DevOps engineer. In the past ~10 years, I am using Ansible for a wide variety of tasks from configuration to infrastructure and container management. I am also the organizer of the Ansible Meetup Dresden and involved in the Ansible community occasionally.

You can find my content on my blog, GitHub, the Ansible Meetup Dresden or meet me at conferences and events.

How to offer an automation platform shared by multiple teams on the basis of Ansible Automation Platform (AAP). What are the requirements to consider and how to address them.

As automation becomes more and more a strategy within each enterprise, it makes sense that someone offers an automation platform that others can use so that they can focus on writing their Ansible automation. We’ll explain how Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) can be used to provide such a platform, what needs to be considered, how to solve some of the challenges, and the lessons we’ve learnt at multiple customers.

Eric Lavarde - Consulting Architect specialized in Platform and Cloud Management solutions, with a very strong focus on Ansible automation. I’m also Automation Community of Practice Manager within Red Hat. You may address me in English, French or German.

Moritz Schönwetter - I help clients with the implementation details and architectural decisions based on Red Hat’s automation portfolio, and I am also experienced in introducing IaC, DevOps and CI/CD methodologies and mindsets in client teams. As a side job, I’m an Automation Community of Practice Manager.