AnsibleFest keeps drawing bigger and bigger crowds as the Ansible community along with world-wide adoption has exploded.

Lots of well-anticipated announcements were shared with the crowd of approximately 1,000 attendees. Two of the biggest, in my opinion, were the open-sourcing of Tower followed by the rapid expansion of over 460 network automation modules that currently supports 33 platforms!

Also worth noting that Red Hat will be offering a fully supported version of the core modules via a new Ansible Engine subscription…this can be booted onto an existing Tower subscription or be standalone.

It was an action-packed event with multiple tracks – something for everyone! I tried to attend sessions from each of the tracks (as best possible…)

AnsibleFest kicked off gloriously with opening talks from of some of the key leaders of Ansible and Red Hat. Closing out the general session was Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst and world-reknown Open Source community leader Robyn Bergeron with an insightful Q&A session. Jim was even decked out in Ansible socks and shirt…

Again this year, I was able to reconnect with many colleagues and friends and make numerous new professional contacts. Its a great event for networking, learning and collaborating.

For AnsibleFest to get any better – it’d have to be longer and offer hands-on labs & workshops… (but then it’d compete with the annual Red Hat Summit!)