Red Hat Summit 2018 Automation Recap

This year Red Hat Ansible Automation was featured in more talks than ever before at Red Hat Summit, as there was an emphasis on automation and management content throughout the conference. Below you’ll find links to the recorded sessions that included Ansible and our Red Hat Management friends from Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite. We hope you enjoy these sessions and share with your colleagues.

Want even more? Mark your calendar for AnsibleFest! We’ll be in Austin, TX this year for two days of conference on Oct 2-3.

SESSION RECAP:

Operations risk remediation in highly secure infrastructures

If you have data concerns about using Red Hat’s operations analytics service, Red Hat Insights, this session is for you. Insights speeds up discovery and automates remediation of potential problems in your Red Hat infrastructure quickly and simply. In this session, William Nix and Bill Hirsch of Red Hat show you how to configure Red Hat Insights to obfuscate and remove sensitive data from Red Hat Insights analytics. You'll learn how Red Hat Insights securely transfers, stores, and protects the data it does use while you're taking advantage of the service. 

Push-button deployments with Red Hat Management, 3rd edition

Learn how to use the natively integrated Red Hat management portfolio to improve efficiency, automation, and overhead. In this session, Maxim Burgerhout and Laurent Domb, Red Hat, show how Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat Satellite 6, and Red Hat Insights can be used to deliver and retire multi-tier applications at scale using integrated Red Hat management components. Learn potential out-of-the-box capabilities, as well as what's needed to build custom automation. You'll gain a new understanding of how to use Red Hat Management tools to solve real-world problems. 

How Walmart uses systems management tools to manage its massive IT operation
at scale

To power the largest retailer in the world, Walmart’s IT operation must manage systems at unprecedented scale. Walmart’s IT leaders will share how they use various automation tools, including Red Hat Satellite, to give them the capacity they need. Darin Lively, Staff Systems Engineer, and Brian Ameling, Staff Systems Engineer, will offer a look into Walmart’s complex architecture and the role open source technologies play in managing it. They’ll also share customizations made across both their infrastructure and client-side operations to make these tools their central point for systems management. You’ll learn how Walmart partnered with Red Hat in their migration from Red Hat Satellite 5 to Satellite 6 and how the results of this work have provided benefits to all users in the open community. Session content © Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. 2018 

Automating your Red Hat Virtualization environment with Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Ansible

In the modern datacenter, virtualization must be able to integrate easily with other key pieces of the infrastructure in order to optimize and streamline operations. Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 includes a number of Red Hat Ansible Engine roles and integrates with Red Hat CloudForms—resulting in faster deployments, configuration, and automation. In this session, Moran Goldboim, Red Hat Virtualization project manager, and Jon Benedict, Red Hat Virtualization tech evangelist, will demonstrate the automation of: - Application deployment. - Security and compliance. - Infrastructure configuration. Jon and Moran will provide both slides and prepared demos to highlight the automation and orchestration of Red Hat Virtualization with Red Hat Ansible Engine and Red Hat CloudForms. 

The Day-2 guide to successful management of applications on Red Hat OpenShift

OpenShift has become a strategic platform for running applications in large scale enterprises. What does it mean to building, maintaining, and supporting a containerized microservice platform like OpenShift and how does the abstraction of applications across your new infrastructure mask identification of common deployment problems? What is the difference between uptime and availability? Does remediation mean scale-up or roll-back? In this session, Dynatrace explores the pain points seen in supporting containerized environments and the challenges in providing end-to-end context around issues such as monitoring pipeline delivery, utilizing Ansible for problem remediation and general operational visibility. Watch now to learn how cluster health jeopardize application response time and availability, and how you can make sure monitoring becomes a cloud platform feature. 

Red Hat Satellite 6 power user tips and tricks

Red Hat Satellite has managed millions of Red Hat systems for more than a decade. Red Hat Satellite 6 provides better management at very large scale, from traditional datacenters to cloud computing environments. In this session, Thomas Cameron and Rich Jerrido of Red Hat will discuss: - New concepts and terminology changes in Red Hat Satellite 6. - Correctly setting up Red Hat Satellite Server for various environments. - Getting packages from Red Hat and third-party content providers. - Organizations, locations, and life-cycle environments, and how to configure them. - Content views and how to manage them. - Provisioning concepts and components. - Hosts and how to manage them. - Host collections and how to use them. 

Automating security and compliance for hybrid environments

Maintaining visibility, control, and security, and ensuring governance and compliance remains paramount, but it becomes more difficult and time consuming in a hybrid infrastructure consisting of physical, virtual, cloud, and container environments. In this session, Lucy Kerner, Red Hat, will show you how a combination of Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Ansible Tower, and OpenSCAP can help you with these challenges in your hybrid infrastructure by automating security and compliance. Specifically, in your hybrid infrastructure, you’ll learn how to easily provision a security-compliant host, how to quickly detect and remediate security and compliance issues, how to ensure governance and control in an automated way, how to do proactive security and automated risk management, how to perform audit scans and remediations on your systems, and how to automate security to ensure compliance against regulatory or custom profiles. 

Google automates [Ansible] module development

Google will discuss best practices for ensuring enterprise consistency between fast moving Ansible community and the always evolving services on GCP. 

Live demonstration: Find it. Fix it. Before it breaks.

A common saying is, "If it ain’t broke, don't fix it." But what if it is broken and you just don't know it? Waiting for something to break means late nights, lunches at your desk, or waiting for a maintenance window to fix issues. However, there are ways for you to automate how you predict, resolve, and manage issues before they cause you headaches. In this session, you'll see a live demonstration of how you can use Red Hat Management solutions, including Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, and Red Hat Ansible Automation, to reduce the risk of security exploits, performance degradation, and stability failures across your Red Hat infrastructure. If you value your time, your sanity, and your lunch hour, don’t miss this session. 

Manage Windows like Linux with Ansible

Few questions induce fear into the heart of a Linux admin more than, "Hey, can you manage these Windows servers?" In this session, we'll show how Ansible does simple, secure, and agentless Windows management with the exact same tools, language, and philosophy used for Linux hosts. You'll never have to log in to a Windows server again. 

Smarter infrastructure management with Red Hat Satellite & Red Hat Insights

Join William Nix and Rich Jerrido of Red Hat, and Sean Halford of Dell Technologies to understand how the solutions together are enabling customers to consistently automate system maintenance, patches, and updates, as well as mitigate evolving risks to growing Red Hat infrastructure. In this session, you will learn to: - Take advantage of remote execution, scheduling, and Ansible Playbooks to create a smarter strategy for optimizing your IT infrastructure management. - Use the techniques used by many of our strategic partners and customers to deliver the safe, secure IT infrastructure required for some of the largest Red Hat deployments in the world.

Hybrid cloud network interconnect with Ansible

As organizations look to operationalize hybrid cloud strategies, it is critical to be able to interconnect clouds together. By using Ansible, organizations can be assured that applications are connected regardless of where the workload is running. In this session, Peter Sprygada and Steven Carter of Red Hat dive into how to use Red Hat Ansible Automation to automate interconnecting public and private clouds at the network layer in support of deploying a hybrid cloud strategy. 

Red Hat Satellite 6: Securing the Linux life cycle in the public sector

The public sector has been hit hard with a number of cyber breaches, often due to application stacks running on hosts lacking essential security patches. Monitoring critical enterprise Linux infrastructure is complex and often hindered by poor governance, fragmented management applications, and unnecessary exposure to the public internet. In this session, learn how Red Hat Satellite 6 is designed to address these all-too-common vulnerabilities with highly structured workflows for deploying standard Linux builds, from early stages to production. Satellite 6 goes further with integrated Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) scanning that combines common vulnerability reporting and misconfigurations into an actionable dashboard tailored for large-scale Linux. You'll also learn how Satellite 6 offers all of its essential security services in a fully disconnected capacity to further protect critical computing assets from infiltration and common exposures. 

Managing 15,000 network devices with Ansible

Ansible allows network management across virtually any device platform. Any network device can be managed via SSH or an API. We took this cutting-edge network automation to scale with a customer’s global network infrastructure, giving them the ability to manage nearly all of their network devices at one time. In this session, Landon Holley and James Mighion from Red Hat discuss the architecture and strategies involved in network automation. 

Using Ansible and Redfish to Automate Systems Management

Ansible is an open source automation engine that automates complex tasks such as application deployments, cloud provisioning, and a wide variety of system administration tasks. It is a one-to-many agentless mechanism where complex deployment and configuration tasks can be managed and monitored from a central control machine. Redfish is an open industry-standard specification and schema designed for modern and secure management of platform hardware. Redfish APIs are available in Dell EMC PowerEdge servers via the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), which is used by IT administrators to remotely monitor and manage their infrastructure using a variety of client applications on devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones. Together, Ansible and Redfish can be used to fully automate at large scale server monitoring, provisioning and update tasks from one central location, significantly reducing management complexity and helping improve the productivity and efficiency of IT administrators. 

Accurate and reportable configuration information for Ansible deployments

Organizations are increasingly automating the deployment of assets on multi-clouds using APIs. Ansible provides an engine to make such automated configuration changes. However, the challenge is to make sure that the state of the infrastructure can be accurately reported at all times and integration with automation tools is straightforward and part of the development lifecycle. A configuration management database (CMDB) could be used as the starting point for driving deployment activities (e.g. by generating Ansible inventories) or to record the output of Ansible execution; or both. In this session, we will describe the organizational challenges and benefits of closely integrating deployment automation activities with a modern and lightweight configuration management database. We will then show an example of such database built as a SpringBoot micro-service running in the OpenShift Container Platform and how it can be used from an Ansible Playbook. 

Automation: Our way to the future, by Airbus

Airbus Civil Aircraft division, with 55,000 employees and €46 billion in revenue, faces many challenges: large and multitechnology environments including 27,000 servers, 430 OS releases, 2,500 databases, and 2,500 business-critical applications with frequent updates. In 2016, Airbus needed a solution for the deployment and operation of applications composed of a low to medium number of components and dependencies. Last year, after an extensive proof-of-concept of 7 solutions, we selected 2 products, Red Hat Ansible Tower and CA Technologies Automic for complex apps. In this session, we'll discuss the benefits we've seen after the first year, including reduced lead time, ease of use, cost savings, better consistency and better allocation of resources. We'll also discuss our next steps for additional node deployment, automation, and integration. 

Code your infrastructure: ELO success story

Most corporations have to modernize so they can reduce cost, manage their growth, and keep competitive in the market. Nevertheless, they still have to make sure their legacy systems and current infrastructure are operating while they make changes and innovate. That’s where automation comes into play. In this session, you will learn how Red Hat Ansible Automation, Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat Gluster Storage, and Red Hat Satellite supported ELO, a Brazilian payment company, to reduce time to market and risks while improving accountability, efficiency, and the quality of their services. Attendees will learn how automation and integration can help your company be disruptive, just like fintechs, while maintaining traditional processes of governance and a high level of security. 

Transforming IT ops: The future of IT automation & management

The convergence of cloud, containers, AI, automation, and open source is rapidly transforming IT operations technologies, best practices, and skills. As a result, IT operations teams are racing to improve operational agility across hybrid and multicloud environments while ensuring that security, performance, and cost requirements are maintained for traditional IT and emerging container and serverless platforms. Attend this session to learn how the open source community and Red Hat can help your organization meet these challenges. 

The DevOps opportunity: Balancing security and velocity

Organizations are in a never-ending race to deliver revolutionary applications, technology and services to improve the customer experience and drive overall growth. Fortunately, the adoption of DevOps is accelerating innovation, allowing developers to achieve unparalleled velocity. But are organizations equipped to handle the security risk that can accompany DevOps speed? This session will explore how one of the world’s largest banks did exactly that. Attendees will learn how Ansible and CyberArk were used to modernize the orchestration of new services and infrastructure for mission-critical applications. Based on real-world use cases, attendees will benefit from practical guidance and techniques shared from the front lines of security, development and operations to successfully modernize the orchestration of new services in their own organizations. 

10 things you didn't know about Red Hat Satellite 6

This session combines a presentation of hidden gems in Red Hat Satellite 6 and many best practices (well, "good" practices, anyway) around the design, deployment, and usage of Satellite 6 in customer environments. We will discuss how to retrieve the backup of configuration files Puppet might have overwritten on your systems, how to more easily correct expired subscriptions, how activation keys attach subscriptions in various ways, and how content view filters work—and more. 

Culture-as-a-Service: Managing teams building microservices

Conway's Law stipulates that teams will build software systems that reflect the organization structure of those teams. It follows that to build software with microservices architecture and DevOps collaboration, a team must embody a culture and organization that promotes that structure. In this session, tailored for managers and engineering team leads, we will explore the team culture of accountability, kindness, and respect necessary to successfully create reliably-operated microservices-oriented software. Attendees will walk away with new ideas on how to implement those transformations in their own teams by understanding the role of management in defining culture. 

Red Hat CloudForms: Turbocharge your OpenStack

If you’ve deployed OpenStack, but you find yourself wanting more, you can offer vast improvements to daily operation and usage of an OpenStack cloud by implementing Red Hat CloudForms. In this session, you will see how CloudForms can greatly extend day two operational capabilities and expedite adoption of OpenStack throughout your enterprise—from end users to operators. CloudForms offers enhanced monitoring and reporting, self service via catalog, fine-grained roles-based access control (RBAC) and user/group filtering, and mapping and scaling of the physical OpenStack infrastructure. In addition, CloudForms integrates with Red Hat Ansible Automation for consistent automation of physical and virtual entities, chargeback and compliance through a highly flexible policy engine that builds upon OpenStack’s inherent capabilities, and integration with other virtualization platforms. Join us to learn about how to turbocharge your OpenStack with CloudForms and hear about success stories of cloud adoption from the trenches. 

Portal solutions for SD-WAN using Ansible network automation

Accenture has developed a new capability for SDN-WAN using Red Hat Ansible Tower and other open source technology. In this session, we'll discuss: -Development of a vendor-neutral solution built on an open source integrated portal with multiple SD-WAN vendors. -Products that offer unified control for clients. -How Ansible Tower network automation helped the integration effort to map different vendor and open source components across clients' enterprise solutions. 

Hybrid cloud management with Ansible and CloudForms

In this session we'll build and manage hybrid cloud environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation and Red Hat CloudForms. 

You can find the complete list of Red Hat Summit 2018 recorded sessions here.