redhat event Ansible Automates Zurich

Here are some fresh personal impressions from the “Ansible Automates Zurich” half day event organized by redhat.
There was a overwhelming interest for this event. About 200 people filled the room and there were many more on the waiting list.
The event started with a networking lunch. My impression was, that the visitors were not only interested in the food, but also gaining some practical knowledge about Ansible. Most of them are already using Ansible.

Eduard Modalek from redhat opened the Event. He was very impressed with the interest in the event.
Sacha Dubois who is a great speaker with solid technical background gave an introduction about Ansible and the impact to your team and enterprise. “Ansible loves the repetitive work your people hate.”

The strength of Ansible is the community. Enjoy the  statistics. Ansible has

• more than 27’000 stars on GitHub
• over 1250 modules and
• more than 500’000 downloads a month

Christian Sanabria and Marc Frauenfelder from ipt – Innovation Process Technology showed how they do Continuous Delivery by combining Jenkins Pipeline with the Ansible Tower API for provisioning. They published the code in GitHub:
https://github.com/mfrauenfelder/ansible/blob/master/Jenkinsfile

After the break Rob McMahon, redhat Director Cloud EMEA, who had already presented a day before at the Ansible Automates Netherlands event, showed his visions about empowering customers with Ansible.  The future are automated organizations and Ansible is the right tool to automate everything and help to overcome the silo character of cross functional teams.

Another customer case has been shown by Nicolas Christener and Lukas Grossar from Adfinis SyGroup AG. They fully automated the roll out of desktop clients.

Roland Wolters from redhat reveals what is coming in March 2018 with Ansible 2.5

• Networking now first level connection “plugin”- credentials just like with any other connections
• Role versioning
• become on Windows features NT AUTHORITY\System and others
• new loop mechanism ( no with_loops anymore)
• fact namespaces

He also explained the differences between Ansible Tower and  the open source project AWX.

The highlight at the end was a live demo which deployed a WordPress environment in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Roland Wolters and Sacha Dubois demonstrated it successfully. Congratulations ! If you have a valid subscription at Microsoft Azure you can try it out https://github.com/sa-ch/ansible-azure-deployment

There has been time for drinks and networking afterwards.
I spoke with Eduard Modalek. The organization was a big challenge, so many people wanted to attend this event and this was the biggest room they could get at such short notice in Zürich. He said that in future there will be more events like this, and perhaps some workshops with time for the audience to exchange ideas.