Ansible Meetup 5 June 2025

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. ...

June 7, 2025 · 1 min · 178 words · Daniel Brennand

Home-Ops | AWX and Ansible Execution Environments

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. ...

May 16, 2025 · 4 min · 725 words · Daniel Brennand

Ansible Meetup 21 November 2024

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 😄 ...

November 30, 2024 · 2 min · 231 words · Daniel Brennand

Testing Ansible Content with Molecule

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. ...

July 30, 2023 · 6 min · 1069 words · Daniel Brennand

Managing Secrets in Ansible

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. ...

April 3, 2023 · 4 min · 816 words · Daniel Brennand

Getting started with Ansible

Hey there! 👋 In this blog post I’ll be writing about Ansible. I’ve been using it for a little while now and I’d like to share my experience with it and share some knowledge for others starting out! :slight_smile: Let’s begin! 🚀 What is Ansible? Ansible is an open-source automation tool which can be used to automate the management and configuration of servers and other devices. Written in Python, Ansible is agentless and connects over SSH. Some common use-cases for Ansible include (but are not limited to): ...

March 5, 2023 · 6 min · 1245 words · Daniel Brennand