Ansible at the Calgary RHUG

Today we had a great presentation from Greg Dekoenigsberg, the Director of Global Open Source Community Relations at Ansible (by Red Hat). With configuration management being such a top topic lately, that sentiment sure was reinforced with the number of attendees we had today – we filled the room! Greg gave the group a high-level overview of Ansible’s feature set, along with what the open source community has been seeing for use-cases, and adoption. Ansible usage has skyrocketed recently, and in one of the research polls Greg showed us, Ansible ranked second only to Kubernetes for anticipated container orchestration software usage in the next year. That just goes to show Ansible’s flexibility and interoperability, as container orchestration wasn’t its original design focus. That’s an interesting part about open source software – you never know what direction your user base is going to take the project. Innovation happens in leaps and bounds, with diverse perspectives doing the steering.

Greg referenced the recently published Ansible, Up and Running book by O’Reilly. This is a great resource to walk you through getting started with Ansible. I had ansible up and running in about 15 minutes, and had made my way through most of the book in a little over an hour. If anyone local would like to borrow my copy, I’m happy to lend it. Ping me!

If you’re interested in attending one of the next Calgary Red Hat User Group meetings, please do reach out. It’s an informal community forum intended to be filled with both technical and business related discussion. All are welcome. The steering committee is really open to bringing in specific content that the group would like to hear about, so if there’s a topic you want to learn more about – please speak up and let them know! We have a meetup.com group we’re currently migrating away from, but you should be able to register here to be notified of the next meeting.

Another nice thing about the RHUGs, sometimes you can score some tech swag! I might have to get a new laptop to fit all these stickers I’m collecting… 😉

You can follow @ansible, and @gregdek for the latest news and developments on Ansible.