How network engineers can get more sleep using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform: Your guide to AnsibleFest 2022

2022년 9월 19일Cindy Russell2분 읽기

Since connectivity is critical to all types of business applications including cloud apps, managing and maintaining the network often falls into the overnight hours. This is great for the business, but it puts a large wrinkle in your work-life balance. Luckily, AnsibleFest is here to help you get more sleep!

Continued use of an overnight network management work model can leave you wondering what other technology career options are available… which may mean that your team is smaller than it used to be due to turnover. Search LinkedIn jobs for “Ansible engineer” and you will find as many as 166,000 roles that ask for some form of Ansible skills. Udemy published the 2020 Workplace Learning Trends Report: The Skills of the Future that describes increased enthusiasm for learning technologies such as automation (page 20) and Cisco cites market research showing nearly 23% growth in network automation from 2022 to 2028. If you are in networking, automation can be very important to boost your career.

Across networking domains, automation plays a key role in helping to balance working hours, so Ansible skills can be good to develop. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform makes management and other tasks faster and easier to complete, and helps reduce the risk of human error. Let’s take pre- and post network checks as an example. How many hours does it take your team to perform each of these necessary functions manually? Did you know that if you automate these checks, you can reduce this time dramatically, perhaps to minutes? And this is just one simple example.

How long does it take you to upgrade firmware on all of your switches? How would you manage dependencies and validations? What if you could use an Ansible Playbook to complete this automatically? You could gain time to focus on important tasks and innovations. What if there is a slow-down or outage? You could automatically reroute traffic, or trigger troubleshooting validations across impacted routers or switches as a first step. These examples all represent much easier ways to work, and the time savings may even improve your work-life balance. AnsibleFest is a great way to build your automation skills and connect with our community.

AnsibleFest 2022 is a great learning opportunity

Ansible Automation Platform customers range from those just getting started to those doing advanced automation, such as process automation like NetSecOps, GitOps for networks and even edge and event driven automation. This year’s agenda is broken out so you can pick up your learning from where you are, where you are heading, or a little of both. Tracks include:

Getting Started with Ansible
Ansible Community
Automation Adoption
Automation Applied
Ansible Automation Platform
Advanced Ansible

Across all of these, you will find network-related content especially in sessions that are delivered by customers. Here are a few network-related session highlights:

Network automation and best practices, presented by the Red Hat technical teams.
Network compliance and remediation.
Network automation talks from companies in telecommunications, retail and other industries.
What’s new in Ansible Automation Platform, including features that help with compliance and upgrading this platform.
New open source releases that expedite the numbers of rote requests you must address.
How to build a GitOps “single source of truth” process and how to build an automation community of practice in your organization.
Automating network configurations with security considerations.
Edge automation sessions that include networking.
Learning about cutting edge options around AI with automation.
Hands-on labs, community-style informal interpersonal networking sessions, and demo options in the expo area.
Connecting with our partners and sponsors.

There’s even some fun in the evening! We hope you will join us at AnsibleFest 2022 in Chicago on October 18-19, 2022. We have a great agenda in store for you so register now!