Ansible Community Day at Red Hat Summit 2023

tags: events

Note: Presentation slide decks are now available at https://ansible.github.io/community/decks/community-day-2023.05/ - it's not complete yet, please check back for updates!

Link to this HackMD: https://hackmd.io/@ansible-community/ACD2023-Boston

Part of Red Hat Summit / AnsibleFest 2023

Date: Monday May 22, 2023
Time: 08:30 - 18:00 EDT
Location: Westin Boston Seaport District
Address: 425 Summer Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02210 USA
Rooms: Commonwealth Ballroom (General Session and Breakout 1), Grand Ballroom C (Breakout 2)

Registration: After you register for Red Hat Summit, please add Ansible Community Day to your schedule

Event Overview

Ansible Community Day is a day-long community-focused event to discuss the Ansible project, community, and the broader ecosystem. It is a gathering of the Ansible community of users, partners, and contributors. Topics covered include case studies from the community, Ansible Community strategy, Documentation, Contributing 101, and much more. Join us and play a part in the growth and development of the Ansible Community!

Breakfast will be available from 8:30 - 9:00 AM on the Pavilion.

Please take a look at the Ansible Community Code of Conduct.

Schedule

General session (morning)

Time	Topic	Speaker(s)
08:30	Breakfast
09:00	Welcome to Ansible Community Day and Community strategy	Walter Bentley
09:30	Community progress and updates, outreach and events	Carol Chen
10:00	Ansible Community Documentation	Sandra McCann
10:30	Coffee break
10:45	How to contribute to Ansible - From User to Contributor	Leonardo Gallego
11:15	The Zen of Ansible	Tim Appnel
12:00	Lunch

Breakout sessions (afternoon)

Please select the breakout track containing the topics that most align with your interest and add that to your schedule.

Breakout 1 - Engaging with Users (session catalog link)

Time	Topic	Speaker(s)
13:00	Chatting with Event-Driven Ansible	Nuno Martins
13:30	Leveraging Ansible and OpenShift for monitoring of on-demand lab environments	Corey Wanless
14:00	Coffee break
14:15	Building a Community with Ansible Automation Platform - Best Practices on Developing and Maintaining Certified Ansible collection Content	Carl Buchmann
15:15	Coffee break
15:30	Ansible Content Creator Tools and the Road Forward	Tim Appnel, Brad Thornton
16:00	DevTools updates covering Ansible VSCode	Ganesh Nalawade
16:30	Closing and thanks!
17:00	Reception at the Westin

Breakout 2 - Participating with Devs (session catalog link)

Time	Topic	Speaker(s)
13:00	Network automation	Trishna Guha, Brad Thornton
13:30	What’s new: cloud automation with amazon.aws 6.0	Trishna Guha
14:00	Coffee break
14:15	AI-Powered Ansible Playbooks: Revolutionizing Automation Through Open-Source Collaboration	Anže Luzar, Gregor Berginc
14:45	AWX Update	John Westcott
15:15	Coffee break
15:30	Edge Automation	Chad Ferman, Adam Miller
16:00	Maintaining Collection Repos	Sean Sullivan, Carl Buchmann, Gregor Berginc
16:30	Closing and thanks!
17:00	Reception at the Westin

Session descriptions

S01

Welcome to Ansible Community Day and Community strategy

S02

Community progress and updates, outreach and events

Share what has been happening since we talked about the strategy at Contributor Summit in February, including the progress of the community website and forum. What's new in Outreach and events and looking ahead to the rest of the year. Community members are welcome to contribute - talk briefly about how they can do that, with a more detailed session by Leo.

S03

Ansible Community Documentation

Update on the new Ansible docsite, with empasis on community personas and user journeys

S04

How to contribute to Ansible - From User to Contributor

In this session we will outline the various ways one can contribute to the Ansible upstream projects. How to turn yourself from an Ansible user into an Ansible contributor in a few easy steps depending on your skills and interests. We will show you how to participate in the various components in the Ansible ecosystem: upstream development (e.g. code and issues), documentation, Meetups, creating media content (e.g. blog posts and videos) and creating Ansible content (e.g. collections, modules, plugins). Join us in this session to level up in the Ansible Community!

S05

The Zen of Ansible

Ansible is capable of handling many powerful automation tasks with the flexibility to adapt to many use cases, environments and workflows. This flexibility, power and its broad adoption over the past 10 years has led to dozens of recommended practices, tips and tricks for automating with Ansible. Underlying all of these is a “zen” to developing effective solutions that achieve a balance of simplicity and power.

With a tip of the fedora to Tim Peter’s “The Zen of Python”, this talk shares these guiding principles, so you can apply it to getting things done and delivering reliable, consistent and repeatable automation solutions with your playbooks and roles. It will further illustrate these principles with their application to some real world examples to Ansible content.

S06

Chatting with Event-Driven Ansible

ChatOps is versatile and fun to use however many shy away from implementing ChatOps due to the possible complexities of getting everything working. We take a look at how we can use Event-Driven Ansible in conjunction with Mattermost/Slack and how easy it is to get up and running with some use cases. We look at a few examples on rulebooks and how Event-Driven Ansible makes ChatOps bot-less and easy to implement.

S07

Leveraging Ansible and OpenShift for monitoring of on-demand lab environments

World Wide Technology (WWT) is an IT solutions provider and Red Hat Partner, serving some of the largest corporations in the Fortune 1000. At WWT, we have built on-demand, isolated lab environments to help our customers make technology decisions faster. Each one of these hundreds of environments acts as a miniature data center, ultimately comprising thousands of virtual instances. Monitoring and ensuring availability of these dynamic yet ephemeral environments can be challenging, and not just any monitoring tool will fit the bill.

In this session we will explore how we built a scalable monitoring and remediation solution leveraging OpenShift, Prometheus, Grafana, Event-Driven Ansible, and Ansible Automation Platform. This closed-loop system gathers and reacts to events to provide increased visibility for operations teams and ensure a positive user experience for lab consumers.

S08

Building a Community with Ansible Automation Platform - Best Practices on Developing and Maintaining Certified Ansible collection Content

Ansible Collections helps us build a community within Arista and with our customers. One of the key aspects of building a community is our focus on quality.
Ansible provides us with a robust framework, tooling, and certification process required to succeed!

In this session, we will explore the following topics:

• Ansible Collection Framework to deliver content to our community.
• CI testing with Ansible Tooling: Molecule, ansible-test, and galaxy-importer
• Importance of Code Style and Structure: pep8, yamlint and Arista’s own jinja2 linter!
• Git workflow for collection development: Branching Strategy, Semantic Versioning, conventional commits.
• Automation collection documentation to Read The Docs.
• Release and certification process with Automation Hub and benefits our customers

S09

Ansible Content Creator Tools and the Road Forward

In this talk we'll step through what it means to be an Ansible content creator and how to leverage the Ansible ecosystem and its community of users. It will cover execution environments (EE) and how tools like ansible-navigator, ansible-lint, VSCode and more can be used today to develop automation content easily with good practices in mind. The talk will conclude with a look at what lies ahead for the Ansible content creator experience in the coming months and years.

S10

DevTools updates covering Ansible VSCode

We cover the Ansible VSCode extension specifically with a focus on Project Wisdom, which provides AI based inline suggestion for Ansible tasks. We will talk about how to setup the extension to provide inline suggestions and how the traning matches panel work which provides most likely source of the code in the suggestion provided by the AI service.

S11

Network automation

Recent updates and roadmap

S12

What’s new: cloud automation with amazon.aws 6.0

When it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure automation, the latest release of the Ansible amazon.aws Collection brings a number of enhancements and new features to help you succeed in your cloud automation journey from development to production. In this session, we will go over what else has changed and highlight what’s new in the 6.0 release of this Ansible Content Collection.

S13

AI-Powered Ansible Playbooks: Revolutionizing Automation Through Open-Source Collaboration

The current state of AI systems is not yet sufficient to generate production-ready Ansible Playbooks without manual rewriting, but the use of playbook scanning tools to improve the quality of generated playbooks helps AI produce better and better results.

Join us for a captivating discussion on how AI-powered Ansible Playbooks, combined with open-source collaboration, can streamline processes and transform the future of automation.

In this session, we’ll talk about:

• Using AI, for example ChatGPT, to generate Ansible Playbooks and iteratively enhance their quality through playbook scanning tools and open-source collaboration.
• Benefits and technical challenges of integrating AI-generated content in IT automation.
• The importance of open-source projects in enriching and improving the generated playbooks.

S14

AWX Update

Update on community initatives including:

• Community PR Triage process
• Community Meetings
• AWX Community Channel
• Upcoming AWX Features

S15

Edge Automation

• what has been happening in the edge space
• edge collections (FDO, infra.osbuild, Microshift)
• how the Community can participate

S16

Maintaining Collection Repos

This is a panel Q&A with two to three collection contributors

Panelists:

• Carl Buchmann
• Gregor Berginc
• Sean Sullivan