ansiblefest

The following is a transcript of the content in my AnsibleFest Atlanta 2019 session, There's a role for that! How to evaluate community roles for your playbooks.

• Presentation slides
• Presentation video

Introduction

I'm Jeff Geerling, I wrote a book on Ansible (Ansible for DevOps), I have used Ansible on an almost daily basis for hundreds of different projects since 2013, and I now work with Red Hat's Ansible team as a technical contractor.

Some people wonder ask how teams can be productive while maintaining many applications on a variety of cloud providers. One of the key reasons is reliance on Ansible content contributed and maintained by others.

This is the third Ansible Contributor Summit I've attended, and the one with by far the most attendees. Contributor Summit is an Ansible community-focused day spent giving Ansible contributors updates on the current status and direction of the Ansible project, as well as an open mic to give feedback to the Ansible core team and other Ansible component teams.

As I have in the past, I thought I'd jot down a few notes from the Summit, with things I learned during the day, for the benefit of those who couldn't attend remotely, or don't have the time to watch all the meeting recordings (see a recap here).

Last year, at AnsibleFest Austin 2018, I presented Make your Ansible playbooks flexible, maintainable, and scalable. All the sessions at AnsibleFest were recorded, and I thought I'd be doubly safe since I presented my session on both days of AnsibleFest! Alas, due to some technical glitch, all the session recordings were lost, and so the only recordings available online today are those which were re-recorded by presenters.

As life happened... re-recording the session was put on the back burner. And after many months, I started to forget the structure of the presentation (I haven't given it since AnsibleFest), so I figured I might never get around to re-recording it at home.

Luckily, though, when I was running through Final Cut Pro to archive the previous years' completed projects, I found a practice recording of the session from the week before AnsibleFest. It was thankfully pretty good, and only needed a few slight edits:

AnsibleFest 2018 is in the books, and it was a great conference! I was able to attend the 'Contributors Summit' in Austin on Monday, and remotely Thursday, and I learned quite a bit! I also presented Make your Ansible playbooks maintainable, flexible, and scalable on both days of the conference. Slides from that session are available below, but you'll have to wait for the actual video to be uploaded to see the fun little gimmick I added for the live presentation 🙃.

AnsibleFest Austin 2018 is about to get started (with a huge party tonight, then a keynote to kick off two full days of sessions tomorrow), and the day before and after the 'Fest marks the 6th "Contributor's Summit", a "working session with the core team and key contributors to discuss important issues affecting the Ansible community".

As with most conference-related events, the best part of the day is getting to meet with and talk to people you work with online, but there are also usually lots of little tidbits discussed during the sessions which aren't yet widely known. Some of the most exciting things I learned today include:

I'm excited to announce I'll be presenting the session Make your Ansible Playbooks Flexible, Maintainable, and Stable at AnsibleFest Austin in the first week of October.

I've spent a lot of time building, maintaining, and in a few cases, completely restructuring Ansible playbooks over the past five years. I hope to distill a lot of the lessons I've learned into this presentation, and I hope anyone else who is as passionate about infrastructure automation as I am can get a lot out of it.

As usual, I'll post slides—and hopefully video as well—from the presentation after it's over. Hope to see you in Austin!

It's been a few weeks since AnsibleFest San Francisco, and Ansible just posted the video recordings of all the sessions from AnsibleFest SF 2016! I was honored to be able to speak about Ansible Roles at this year's west coast AnsibleFest, and I also arrived a little early so I could participate in the Ansible Contributor Conference on July 27.

Picture from my session courtesy of The Appnel Group.

I'm excited to announce that I'll be speaking at AnsibleFest San Francisco 2016, on July 28th, giving a session titled Ansible Roles - for Fun and Profit!

Image from AnsibleFest London, earlier in the year.

AnsibleFest is the major bi-annual Ansible conference, full of case studies, sessions and announcements. I'm excited to finally be able to attend, as I've been an avid user of Ansible since 2013, even to the point of writing one of the most popular introductory books on Ansible, Ansible for DevOps.