A couple of weeks ago, I found in my inbox an invitation from Red Hat concerning an event organized in Bern about Ansible.
I heard a lot about Automation but did not really know what can or could be automated. Infrastructure? Application deployment? Networks? Containers? Cloud? All of them? So I wanted to learn more about Ansible and decided to participate!
This “Ansible Automates” was a full-day event taking place in the KURSAAL hotel, located in the center of Bern, a nice place.

After the registration process and a welcome coffee, I took a seat in the conference room and I was immediately impressed as already more than 140 persons were in. It seems to be that there was a huge interest for this event.

Some Welcome words from Eduard Mobalek, Red Hat Head of Sales and the first session started punctually at 09:15.
It was titled “Automation Everywhere, Product Overview and Roadmap”.
Belkacem Moussouni, Head of Business Development EMEA focused on: “Why should we use Ansible instead of other mature products as Puppet or Chef” and the main reason was because of its simplicity.
By using YAML, a simple configuration language, you could write your own playbook in less than an hour.

The next session was leaded by Nicholas Christener, CEO/CTO of ADFINIS SYGROUP AG.
A customer case introducing a handbook to Ansible following their guidelines and best practices.

After the coffee break, Mr Christoph Bernard from Visana Services, talked about how to automate security-related tasks.
How to use Ansible for various use cases such as fraud detection, network security, or governance.

“E Guete!”: on the screen was announcing that it was Lunch Time. Just outside the conference room, was a huge buffet waiting for us.

At 14:15 started the session called “Network Automation with Ansible Tower 3.5”. The speaker introduced all new features and enhancements that improve network automation as:
– Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
– New Inventory Plugins
– Extended list display
– Enhanced metrics

At 15:30 started the last session called “Manage Windows with Ansible”. The speaker, Götz Rieger, Senior Solution Architect showed how to manage Windows Servers – Step by Step using PowerShell scripts and Playbooks:

This event ended as usual with an apero together with the Ansible team and all the other participants. It’s always nice to meet other people, share knowledge and have some networking moments! That’s the way we work at dbi services ! 🙂
Now, let’s say, I know much more about automation but what I learnt overall during this event is if you need to make your life easier by automating your administration tasks, Ansible is a good place to start.
All sessions were well prepared, but as I was speaking to one of the Ansible TEAM member, I told him that the only thing missing in this event was a workshop.

So, let’s wait for next!