Berlin, Germany – September 20, 2023
Ansible Community Day Berlin 2023 brought together developers, sysadmins, and automation engineers from across Europe. Hosted by Red Hat and powered by the Ansible community, the event focused on collaboration, open innovation, and sharing real-world use cases.
The venue was c-base in Berlin.
The main hall at c-base between sessions, with the audience settling in.
My talk: From Zero to Hero, how to build the Ansible Pilot Community
I was on the agenda myself, with “From Zero to Hero: How to build the Ansible Pilot Community”, scheduled for 14:15–15:00. That morning I recorded a short clip saying I was looking forward to sharing insights about my YouTube channel from the stage. Ansible Pilot is that channel, and the talk was about how its community was built.
On stage at c-base with the title slide.
I gave a talk with the same title again at Cloud Native London in December 2023. The recording is in my Cloud Native London 2023 post.
The agenda
The event schedule as shown on screen at c-base.
The schedule slide listed the day like this (titles and names as written on it):
- 09:00 Welcome to Ansible Community Day (Carol Chen)
- 09:10 Ansible Community Strategy 2023: The Half-Year Update (Greg Sutcliffe)
- 09:55 Automation Good Practices (Eric Lavarde, Moritz Schoenwetter)
- 11:00 Migrating from AWX/Ansible Tower to Ansible Controller using Config as Code approach (Silvio Perez Torres, Ivan Aragones Muniesa, Adonis Garcia Castro)
- 11:45 Enhancing Ansible Open Source Projects with Steampunk Spotter (Anže Luzar, Nejc Slabe)
- 13:30 Ansible in a Devcontainer: entire arista.avd ecosystem in a sealed bottle (Petr Ankudinov, Patrick Mathy)
- 14:15 From Zero to Hero: How to build the Ansible Pilot Community (Luca Berton)
- 15:30 Ansible - The hard way
The rest of the schedule ran off the bottom of the screen in my photo.
Talks I watched
Automation Good Practices and the Zen of Ansible
The morning good-practices session covered dynamic inventory: the screen showed an example project with dynamic_inventory_plugin.yml, dynamic_inventory_script.py and per-group files. A later slide read “And don’t forget the Zen of Python Ansible”, credited “By Guru Tim Appnel”.
The Zen of Ansible slide during the Automation Good Practices session.
Steampunk Spotter: Ansible scanning tools
The XLAB Steampunk session included an overview slide titled “Ansible scanning tools”: Ansible Lint, Ansible Later, Ansible Navigator, Ansible Molecule, KICS (Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure), Deepsource and Steampunk Spotter. Then came “Selecting and scanning projects: Ansible Lockdown, RedHat COP, etc.”, with the ansible-lockdown/RHEL7-CIS repository on screen. In the part I recorded, the speaker walked through the resulting pull requests: one where fully qualified collection names were fixed, and one with best-practice changes, where Spotter’s --rewrite option rewrote a task to use the extended syntax.
The Steampunk Spotter session’s map of Ansible scanning tools.
My take: running a scanner across well-known public roles is a good way to calibrate it before you point it at your own estate. You find out quickly which findings are noise and which are real.
Arista AVD in a devcontainer
The Arista session started with “What is Ansible AVD?”. AVD stands for Arista Validated Design, as it was based on the EVPN Deployment Guide. The slide called it a community project for deploying EVPN-based data centre fabrics, with over 200 stars on GitHub and 79 contributors as of September 2023, and the most active Arista collection on Ansible Galaxy. The high-level workflow was:
- Define abstracted group and host vars using the AVD data model.
- Generate low-level, device-specific variables (structured configs).
- Parse templates and build plain-text configs.
- Deliver configs to network devices using
arista.eos.eos_config.
Arista Validated Design explained during the devcontainer session.
Turning AAP into AaaS
Late in the afternoon, a session on setting up Ansible Automation Platform as a service opened with its agenda: Why AaaS?, Requirements, Turning AAP into AaaS, and Learnings. The next slide asked “What turns AAP into AaaS?”.
The agenda of the Ansible Automation Platform as a Service session.
Highlights from the Event
A Recap of a Memorable Conference
Meeting Carol Chen — Open Source Community Architect at Red Hat
A Decade of Ansible — Daniel Schier
Insights from Greg Sutcliffe, Community Manager at Red Hat
SRE Perspective with David Forster of RELEX
Red Hat Automation Architects: Eric Lavarde & Moritz Schönwetter
Anže Luzar of XLAB Spotter — Open Source Innovation
Petr Ankudinov of Arista Networks — Future of Networking
University Perspective with Kai & Sebastian from FU Berlin
Why It Mattered
Ansible Community Day Berlin 2023 showcased:
- 🧠 Knowledge-sharing from contributors and architects
- 🤝 Networking with professionals from diverse backgrounds
- 🛠️ Use-case driven insights in automation and DevOps
- 💡 Community-driven innovation and inclusive participation
From panel discussions to spontaneous hallway chats, it was a day packed with open-source energy and future-shaping ideas.
👉 Explore the full recap on ansiblepilot.com
