AnsibleFest London 2016

This year I attended AnsibleFest in London. I have been using Ansible extensively at work and a combination of very interesting talks, being somewhat nearby (read, not across an ocean) and not having a super expensive ticket price made it so that I could go. The conference itself started early in the morning and happened in a hotel very near the O2 Arena. It had a kind of lobby with about ~5 sponsor booths, and one very large conference room with a low stage.

If you just want to watch the presentations yourself (you should!) just head to the recorded sessions. There are some things that are missing like the initial Ansible company update, roadmap and new networking features and some other presentations about writing modules for Ansible, a panel discussion about the meaning of the word DevOps and a final Q&A with the top Ansible guys.

The top talks that I would recommend watching are “Deploying a Mesos based visual effects studio with Ansible” and “Immutable infrastructure at scale with Ansible”. These go over actual stories of deployment workflows and how Ansible is making that easy. The last Q&A with the Ansible guys was also pretty interesting, the first question from the crowd was an instant “Is Ansible Tower going to be open-sourced?” which was met with laughs and an exciting answer. They acknowledged that Red Hat is committed to open sourcing Ansible Tower, and further along in the conversation there was also the question of open-sourcing Ansible Galaxy, which they were also in favor of.

There were also some other interesting presentations but can’t really relate to the pains of Windows set ups, or how crazy it is to update networking gear so it was good for a laugh and learning a bit about things I have no contact with. After all the presentations there were some drinks available and people just hang around asking each other how they deploy things which was really very interesting because you get to see what goes on in other places and how the engineering culture is.

All in all it was a great day and I would highly recommend attending if you do any serious Ansible.