last Thursday's Ansible & Packer Meetup

Time to get hands on again! Delighted to be back at The Digital Hub, Mihai was our host again to kick off a series of hands-on sessions, best practices and demos covering DevOps, Infrastructure as Code, GitOps, building and packaging operating systems and applications, secure coding practices and more.

During his session, Mihai demoed an end-to-end workflow using Git, Packer, OpenSCAP and Ansible - and discussed best practices for building and packaging applications for hybrid / multi-cloud environments. He showed how using a single source, you can build images to target IBM Cloud, VMware, KVM, Xen, Azure, AWS, Vagrant and more - then through OpenSCAP rules - apply compliance from anything from HIPAA to PCI.

Mihai explained some of the benefits of having SELinux turned on - not just on production systems - and how environment parity and consistency - and demoed best practices for Ansible playbooks - including the use of Molecule for testing across platforms, GOSS for unit testing - and Cookiecutter for templates.

All of Mihai's material is available on: https://kubernetes-native.github.io/k8s-workshop/docs/

As usual, we loved the beer and pizza networking session, and it was great for everyone to share experiences and understand each others' challenges out there in the real world, in a more relaxed vibe.

Mihai is currently working on a number of topics, including:

• SELinux / security deep dive: an exploit driven approach to security awareness
• OpenShift Deep Dive: Hands-on with OpenShift and live cluster provisioning 
• OpenShift for Data Engineers and Data Scientists
• Edge Computing with Kubernetes on the Raspberry Pi: Setup your very own portable cluster
• Ansible Deep Dive and Best Practices: Advanced Ansible, Molecule and Tower

Any further questions, feedback etc - please leave a comment in the community. A big thank you again to The Digital Hub for having us, and to all who attended. If you haven't already, please join our meetup group - and you can find all the presentations for this years' events in this handy repo - looking forward to see you all again for our future workshops!