[SGVLUG] Meeting Recap: Ansible and OpenX

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,
tl;dr Great talk on Ansible.  Great thanks to the guys (MPS, Starch, Braddock, James, JohnW) for handling A/V and intros.  OpenX is a fantastic venue and muchas gracias to Bobby for hosting.  JohnS brought wireless keyboards to give away.  Next month's talk will be Dan Isla on Docker, location TBD.
Mark your calendars: Dan Isla from JPL will be talking about Docker at the June 11th meeting.  Location TBD.
John Slayton brought wireless keyboards to give away.  He will be giving a presentation on his multiple keyboard/one computer setup that he uses to teach children.  This will be scheduled sometime in summer when school is out of session.  We may get a preview of it during one of the HAK meetings, if we can't get an open slot for LUG.
The May meeting went really well.  Andrew Hamilton gave a great introduction to Ansible, how to get started, and why you would use it.  He was kind enough to let us record it.   I hope the video came out well because it was a very interactive talk with many questions from the audience.

 It was recorded with permission from our speaker.  Big thanks to Bobby M. from OpenX for making it possible to meet at OpenX.  And I especially appreciate the guys for taking care of running the meeting from A/V setup to intros and Linux in the News: Michael Proctor-Smith, Michael Starch, Braddock, James, and John Wang.   And Matt Campbell for asking some great questions and setting the tone for the meeting.
 I became interested in Ansible when I saw their booth at SCALE, and I was lucky enough to make contact with Andrew Hamilton, who agreed to talk at our LUG, despite having to come from Santa Monica to do it.   He did a great job of structuring his talk  to give newbies a little introduction to how Ansible works and the terminology involved and then showing us more and more detailed examples.   Ansible is an automation tool that can be used to run adhoc commands, do configuration management and deployment on remote servers.  It has been compared to Puppet and Chef, and reasons that it is preferred for some use cases are because it's simple, extensible, and agent-less.
It was obvious that he was speaking to his own experience with the product and he was frank about what he didn't know.  I really enjoy these types of talks because you're getting a combination of lessons learned and best practices from someone who regularly uses the technology. It augments the documentation and makes it easier to get started.  It's even better when people start asking questions.  I'm looking forward to using Ansible at work.

This meeting was promoted a little more heavily than we normally promote meetings because it's a specialized topic and I wanted to make sure we had an audience that was interested and would ask great questions.  I didn't do a count during the event, but I think Mic reported about 25 or 26 people.  We had 44 RSVPs on Meetup plus a few people who RSVPed through me, but I think that the rain really messed with people's plans.
 OpenX is a fantastic and supportive venue.  They often use that space for presentations and workshops, so there were built-in projection screens and projectors, and they had most of the A/V equipment on hand.  We brought some additional microphones, cameras, and devices for our own recording.  And blessed be, there was decent wifi.  OpenX also provided pizza and drinks.  (I am jealous that they have a refrigerator filled with a variety of drinks.)  

>From my understanding of how it works, the company is very supportive about hosting these kinds of events, but one of their employees has to step up and be responsible for making the arrangements, setting things up, and closing things up afterwards.  Our OpenX host was Bobby M., who  very cheerfully fielded all my emails and set things up despite it being an extremely busy week for him.  I'm trying to sweet talk him into doing it again in June for the Docker talk.
 I think OpenX would also be a good venue if we were trying to do some hackathon or installfest or even workshop.  Something to keep in mind if we want to do something ambitious.

Lan



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