Impressions from #AnsibleFest London 2016 [Update]

The #AnsibleFest was taking place in London, and I was luckily able to attend. This post shares some impressions from the event, together with interesting announcements and stories.

Update: The slides of the various presentations are now available.

Preface

The #AnsibleFest London 2016 took place near the O2 Arena and lasted the entire day. The main highlight of the conference was the network automation coming along with Ansible now. Other very interesting talks covered very helpful tips about managing Windows Servers, the 101 on modules, how to implement continuous deployment, the journey of a french bank towards DevOps, how Cisco devices can be managed and how to handle immutable infrastructure. All focused on Ansible, of course.

But while the conference took place during Thursday, the #AnsibleFest started already the evening before: at the social event Ansible Social.

And it was a wonderful evening: many people from Ansible, partners, coworkers from Red Hat and others were there to enjoy drinks, food and chatting through the evening. Getting to know many of the people there went pretty well, it was a friendly bunch meeting at a pretty nice place.

Keynote

Upon arrival at the conference area one of the sponsor desks immediately caught the eye: Cisco!

For everyone following Ansible news closely it was obvious that networking would be a big topic, especially since it was about to be featured twice during the day, once by Peter Sprygada from Ansible and later on by Fabrizio Maccioni from Cisco.

And this impression was confirmed when Todd Barr came to the stage and talked about the current state of Ansible and what to expect in the near future: networking is a big topic for Ansible right now, they are pushing resources into the topic and already hinted that there would be a larger announcement during the #AnsibleFest. During the presentation the strengths of Ansible were of course emphasized again: that it is simple to setup, to understand and to deploy. And that it does not require agents. While I do have my past with Puppet and still like it as a tool in certain circumstances, I must admit that I had to smile at the slide about agents.

I have to admit, for many customers and many setups this is in fact true: they do not want agents for various reasons. And Ansible can deliver actual results without any need for a client.

The future of Ansible

Next up was Bill Nottingham talking setting the road for the future of Ansible. A focus is certainly better integration of Windows (no beta tag anymore!), better testing – and Python 3 support! It was acknowledged that there are more and more distributions out there not providing any Python 2 anymore and that they need to be catered.

Ansible Tower was also covered, of course, and has very promising improvements coming up as well: the interface will be streamlined, the credentials and rights system will be improved, and there will be (virtual) appliances to get Ansible Tower out of the box in an instant. But the really exciting part is more large-scale, enterprise focused: Ansible Tower will be able to cater federated setups, meaning distributed replication of Ansible Tower commands via proxy Towers.

Don’t expect this all in the next weeks, but we might see many of these features already in Ansible Tower 3.0. And it was mentioned that there might be a release in early fall.

Scaling abilities are indeed needed – many data centers these days have more than one location, or are spread over several departments and thus need partially independent setups to manage the infrastructure. At the same time, there are Ansible customers who are using Ansible with 50k nodes and more out there, and they have a demand for fine grained, federated infrastructure setups as well.

Networking with Ansible

While the upcoming Ansible Tower had some exciting news, the talk about networking support by Peter Sprygada really blew everyone away. Right at the moment of presentation Red Hat issued a press release that they bring DevOps to the network via Ansible:

[Red Hat] is bringing DevOps to networking by extending Ansible – its powerful IT automation and DevOps platform – to include native agentless support for automating heterogeneous network infrastructure devices using the same simple human and machine readable automation language that Ansible provides to IT teams.

Peter picked that up and presented a whole lot of technical details. The most important one was that there are now several networking core modules for commands, configuration and templates.

They cover a huge load of devices:

• Arista EOS
• Cisco NXOS
• Cisco IOS
• Cisco IOSXR
• Cumulus Linux
• Juniper Junos
• OpenSwitch

While some of these devices were already supported by the raw module or some libraries out there, but fully integrated modules supported by Ansible and the network device manufacturers themselves takes networking automation to another new level. If you are interested, get the latest Ansible networking right away.

Ansible in a visual effects studio

The next talk was by the customer “Industrial Light and Magic”, a visual effects studio using Ansible to handle there massive setup via Ansible. It showed in particular how many obstacles you face in your daily routine running data centers and deploying software all the time – and how to tackle them using Ansible and Ansible’s features. I forgot to take a photo, though…

Ansible & Windows

John Hawkesworth from M*Modal came up to the stage next and delivered a brilliant speech about all the things needed to know when managing Windows with Ansible. Talking about the differences of Ansible 1.9 vs 2.0 briefly, he went over lessons learned like why the backslash should be escaped every time just to be sure (\t …) but also gave his favourite development and modules quite some attention. Turns out the registration module can come in very handy!

Writing modules, 101

Next up James Cammarata introduced how to write modules for Ansible. And impressively, this was live demonstrated by a module he had written the days before to control his Philips Hue lights. They could be controlled via Ansible live on stage.

Besides the great live demo the major points of the presentation were:

• It is quite easy to develop modules.
• Start of simply, get more complex the further you go down the road.
• Write a module when your Playbook for a single task exceeds ten lines of code.
• Write in Python/Powershell when you want it to be integrated with Ansible Core.
• Write in any language you want if you won’t share it anyway.

While I am sure that other module developers might see some of these points different, it gives a rather good idea what to keep in mind when the topic is approached.

Of course, the the code for the Philips Hue Ansible module is available on Github.

Continuous deployment

Continuous integration is a huge topic in DevOps, and thus especially with Ansible. Steve Smith of Atlassian picked up the topic and discussed what needs to be taken into account when Ansible is used to enable continuous integration.

And there were many memorable quotes during the talk which made it simply fun to watch. I particularly like this one:

Release features, not dumps.

It means: do release when you have something worth releasing – not at arbitrary dates. It is a strong statement against release or maintenance windows and does make sense: after all, why should you release when its not worth? And you certainly will not wait if it is important!

Also, since many maintenance windows are implemented because doing maintenance is hard:

Everything which is hard should be done more often, not less.

Combined with the fact that very complex, but successful enterprises do 300 releases an hour it is clear that continuous deployment is possible – but what often is needed is the right culture and probably at some point a great, simple to use tool able to cater the needs of complex infrastructure.

Ansible accelerates deployment

The next talk focused on a vertical which might usually say that they are too regulated and “special” to integrate DevOps: financial. Fabrice Bernhard presented the journey of the Bank Société Générale introducing DevOps principles with the help of Ansible to become more agile, more flexible and to be able to respond quicker to changes. The reason for that was summarized in a very good quote:

It’s not the big that eat the small. It’s the fast that eat the slow.

This is true for all the enterprises out there: software enabled companies have attacked almost any given business out there (Amazon vs Walmart, Uber vs cabs, Airbnb vs hotels and hostels, etc.). And there are enough analysts right now who see the banking market as the next big thing which might be seriously disrupted due to mobile payment, blockchain technology and other IT based developments.

But that also shows what the actual change must be about: the new companies do not take over because they have the better technology. They take over because they have a different culture, and approach problems totally different. And thus, to keep up with the development, change your culture. Or, as said on stage:

Automation is about cultural change. Move fast and break things!

DevOps discussion

After these two powerful talks the audience had a chance to catch some breath during the interactive DevOps discussion. It mainly picked up the topics from the previous talks, and it showed that everyone in the room is pretty sure that DevOps as such is more or less a name on the underlying situation that enterprises need to adopt – or they will fail in the long term, no matter how big they are.

Managing your Cisco data center – with Ansible

As already mentioned, Fabrizio Maccioni from Cisco had the second talk about managing networks with Ansible.

Interestingly enough, he mentioned that the interest to support Ansible was brought to them by customers who were already managing part of their infrastructure with Ansible. A key point is that Ansible does not require an agent. While Cisco does support some configuration management agents on their hardware, it seems that most of the customers would not do that.

Immutable infrastructure

The last presentation was held by Vik Bhatti from Beamly. Their problem is that sometimes they have to massively scale in seconds. Literally, in seconds. That requires them to have images of machines up and running in no time. They do this with Ansible, having the playbooks right on the images on one hand, and using Ansible to control their image build process on the other. Actually, the image builder is Packer and it uses Ansible to partially build the image.

As a result, down the line they have images ready to deploy and can extend their environment very, very, very quickly. Since they are able to respond that fast, they were able to cut down hardware costs massively.

Final discussions, happy hour

The final panel dealt mainly with questions about Open Source Tower (it will be there eventually, but no fixed date) and similar questions. After that, everyone went to enjoy drinks and a beautiful skyline.

Conclusion

In conclusion the #AnsibleFest was a great success, in terms of the people I met as well as in terms of the technical discussions. I can’t wait to get my hand on the networking modules. I’d like to thank the people from Ansible making this event possible, and of course my employer Red Hat for making it possible to visit this event.