WORDS BY Jasna Simončič, Tadej Borovšak

September holds a special place in the Ansible world. Why? Because of the AnsibleFest, of course! It is one of the biggest IT automation events in the world where seasoned pros and new Ansible enthusiasts alike can find something exciting to learn.

To make things even more awesome, Ansible Contributor Summit is also happening at the same time. So if you are interested in how the Ansible community works and where it is heading, you will not want to miss it.

And yes, we do have a few talks scheduled for both AnsibleFest and Contributor Summit, being Ansible veterans as we are :) In AnsibleFest 2019, we were one of the first to talk about the next big thing in Ansible, the almighty Ansible Collections we all come to know and love by now. A year later, we explained how to attract new users with high-quality Ansible Collections. And we will shamelessly plug what we will be talking about in this year’s sessions in the remainder of this post ;)

Getting your feet wet

If you always wanted to be an active member of the Ansible community, the first day of the Contributor Summit (2021-09-28) is what you will not want to miss. We will be giving a live demo on setting up a development environment that you can use to start contributing to various Ansible collections.

You will also be able to participate in interactive coding sessions that community members prepared on Instruqt, talk to collection maintainers about their work, get someone to help you fix the bug that is bothering you for the last month, etc. It will be fun, we promise!

Bring your Ansible playbook to the next level

On the first day of AnsibleFest (2021-09-29), you can stop by our Avoiding common mistakes in your Ansible playbooks talk where you will learn a thing or two about making your Ansible playbooks reliable and versatile. We will talk about things like state enforcement, best practices, and automated testing on multiple platforms.

If you never heard about Ansible Lint, Molecule, or Steampunk Scanner before, you should not miss this talk. Also, if you have any questions, we will be available in the chat during the presentation. So feel free to say hello and ask us a question or two.

Develop high-quality Ansible Collection

In collaboration with Timothy Appnel, Ansible Senior Product Manager, we also prepared an on-demand talk called The value of high-quality Ansible Collections that is targeted at all Ansible user groups. Ansible collection developers will learn a thing or two about the design of high-quality plugins and modules and why quality matters when it comes to user experience. And Ansible users will learn what they can expect from an Ansible collection and when should they complain to collection maintainers because the content they are using sucks ;)

The talk will demonstrate the core principles and best practices of building and maintaining high-quality Ansible Collections using the ServiceNow Ansible Collection that we designed and developed together with Red Hat as an example.

Are you registered yet?

If no, then pay AnsibleFest and Contributor Summit registration pages a visit. The registration for both events is free. And since the events are virtual, you do not even have to get out of bed to attend (which is probably a bad thing, but who are we to judge ;). See you there!

Cheers!