Community day at Red Hat Summit this year included a great selection of talks around Ansible and the Ansible community. This post shares a summary of these presentations, along with the slides presented.
Ansible Collab opening session
The day kicked off for Ansible with the Ansible Collab opening session: Collaborating for success.
Presenters:
- Matthew Jones, Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat
- Kevin Myers, Senior Director, Engineering, Ansible, Red Hat
- Helen Bailey, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
- Ganesh Nalawade, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
This session detailed what the Red Hat Ansible team is focusing on through the rest of 2025 and into 2026.
Key topics:
- The health of our community and where it is growing
- How we’re progressing with adoption of the Ansible Forum
- AWX, AAP and how we’re modernizing for the future
- The developer experience and how it shapes the future of Ansible
Slides (2.6 MB)
Creating sustainable automation content, the Ansible way.
We next learned about Creating sustainable automation content, the Ansible way
Presenters:
- Don Naro, Senior software engineer, Ansible community team, Red Hat
- Sandra McCann, software engineer, Ansible Community, Red Hat
The session presented a shared understanding of the benefits of setting up a community of practice with your Ansible content developers. It explored how approaching automation from a collaborative mindset can bring benefits to small or large communities.
Key topics:
- Benefits of a community of practice for Ansible content developers
- Collaborative automation mindset for small and large communities
- Development patterns for collaborative testing and contribution
- Avoiding technical debt
- Improving maintenance
- Enhancing security posture
Slides (1.6 MB)
Getting Started writing Ansible modules
Another well-attended season, Get started writing Ansible modules delved into creating modules.
Presenters:
- Chyna Sanders, Associate Software Engineer, Red Hat
- Helen Bailey, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
This session walked you through how Ansible engineers design and create new content every day.
Key topics:
- Examined a novel case study for automation.
- Explained how to identify which endpoints to automate and at what granularity.
- Covered how to choose good user interface points from an API.
- Talked about how to plan for future expansion.
- Explored tools and approaches we recommend to help you be successful, for whatever you want to automate next.
Slides (1.8 MB)
State of Ansible Core 2025
We then heard an update on the State of Ansible Core 2025.
Presenters:
- sivel (Ansible Core Team)
- bcoca (Ansible Core Team)
The Ansible Core leads talked about what’s new in ansible-core for 2025, and gave a sneak peek at some in-progress features.
Key topics:
- New data tagging features in
ansible-core. - User-visible benefits of a major internal overhaul.
- Practical tips for plugin developers and content authors.
Slides (383.2 KB)
Ansible Community Day: Key Takeaways
Community day kicked off with an update on Ansible’s strategic direction, emphasizing community health, forum adoption, and modernization of AWX/AAP. Followon sessions covered creating sustainable automation content through community collaboration and best practices for writing Ansible modules. An update on Ansible Core 2025 introduced the overhaul of templating in ansible-core coming in 2.19.
Next Steps
- Review all session slides for more in-depth information.
- Read the posts here to explore the AWX/AAP modernization effort.
- Review the posts on
ansible-core2.19 changes and how to prepare for them in your playbooks, roles, and collections..