Hi, I’m Daniel Brennand 👋

It was another great Ansible meetup in London on the 5th June 2025. It was hosted at Metro Bank’s offices near Holburn and the attendance was excellent! I gave a talk titled Ansible 101 - Getting Started on your Ansible Journey. The talk was aimed at members of the community who’re new to Ansible and just starting their Ansible journey. We covered key terminology and concepts such as: Inventories, Playbooks, Modules and Plugins, Roles, Collections and Ansible Vault. ...

Hey there folks! 👋 Back again with another blog post! This time I wanted to discuss some cool changes I’ve made in my Homelab to explore AWX and Ansible Execution Environments. What is AWX? AWX provides a web interface and REST API for managing and running Ansible content. AWX is the upstream project which Red Hat’s commerical offering Ansible Automation Platform’s Automation Controller is based on. AWX uses Execution Environments to run Ansible content and is deployed on Kubernetes using the awx-operator. ...

I had an awesome time at the Ansible Meetup in London on the 21st of November 2024. The meetup was attended by around 25 people and was hosted at the Dell Technologies offices in London. The meetup was sponsored by Red Hat and Krameff Solutions. I did my first ever talk at a meetup titled: Infrastructure as Code - VPS provisioning and configuration on Hetzner Cloud. Hetzner is a public cloud provider I’ve used for personal projects and in my Homelab. I’ve been really impressed with their service and the value for money they offer. As part of my talk, I did a live demo of deploying a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and configuring a NGINX web server on the VPS using Ansible. The talk went really well and there was a some great Q&A with the audience 😄 ...

Right now, I’m writing this blog post sitting in a coffee shop, securely routing all my traffic through a device on my home network and have access to all my Homelab services and devices as if I was at home too. How? Tailscale! ❤️ What is Tailscale? Tailscale is a secure and private, identity-based, infrastructure agnostic network with a flexible topology, resilient networking, and a streamlined setup. — Tailscale Inc1 ...

Hello internet! 👋 In this blog post I will cover how to get started with Visual Studio Code Dev Containers. What are Dev Containers and why use them? Dev Containers provide a containerised development environment within Visual Studio Code. With Dev Containers, you and your team can have a consistent development environment, regardless of the host OS. Moreover, it helps ease the onboarding process, getting new team members up and running quickly, and helps avoid common issues such as “it works on my machine” or “oh, you’ve got a different version of x”. ...

Towards the end of last year, I introduced Proxmox into my Homelab. I’m using it to host various services on VMs and LXC containers. In my setup, I have two external SSDs providing storage, these are connected to my Proxmox node via USB 3.0. However, recently I was experiencing issues with the SSDs suddenly disconnecting from the Proxmox node! This was very frustrating because the VM filesystems that were on these SSDs were becoming corrupted! 😱 This issue was happening on Proxmox 8.1.3 and kernel version 6.5.11-7-pve. ...

Why I’m Migrating from Google Workspace and Outlook to iCloud+ Google Workspace My Google Workspace subscription is becoming increasingly more expensive 💰. The current price is £8.28 for the Business Standard plan, and next month this will be increasing to £9.20. This has become too expensive for me, and I’ve been looking for a cheaper alternative. Outlook Mail I have an Outlook account which has been lying dormant for a long time now. ...

And we’re back! 👋 In this blog post we will be looking at building and publishing a container image to GitHub Packages using GitHub Actions! I recently revisited an old project of mine; now called speeder. It’s a Python script to monitor your internet speed and send the results to InfluxDB. The results can then be visualised in Grafana. I originally created this script during the Coronavirus lockdowns whilst internet usage was high and essential for work. Since that time, I’ve learned a lot about CI/CD and noticed I hadn’t automated the build and publish process of the container image! 😬 Time to fix that! 👷 ...

Time for another blog post! 🚀 In this blog post, I will be discussing how to test Ansible content with Molecule 🧪 What is Molecule? Molecule aids in the development and testing of Ansible content: collections, playbooks and roles. github.com/ansible-community/molecule1 Why do we need to test Ansible content? Testing is an integral part of the software development lifecycle. It helps identify and prevent bugs from reaching production and in some cases, helps identify performance issues. When creating Ansible content we need to ensure that it works as expected and that we are not introducing any undesired behaviour. This is where Molecule comes in. ...

Hi there! 👋 In my previous blog post I covered how to get started with Ansible. In this blog post I’ll be continuing to write about Ansible and covering how to manage secrets in Ansible playbooks. Ready… set… go! 🚀 Managing Secrets in Ansible 🔑 As with most automation, we need to use credentials to authenticate to our servers and other applications. Examples of secrets include usernames and passwords, API keys, SSH keys, etc. When using these types of secrets in playbooks, we need to store them securely but also still allow Ansible to access them when needed. ...