Outreach: Speakers

Finding Speakers

Some simple guidelines for finding speakers for your meetups.

Always ask your meetup members first!

The best meetups are always, always, always meetups that are driven by strong local content. If you have Ansible experts in your meetup, you should be asking them to share their experiences. The topic "How we use $TECHNOLOGY at $COMPANY" always leads to valuable and educational discussion.

Lightning talks

Lightning talks are a good way of getting your meetup members talking. Even if you already have a speaker, asking for 5-minute lightning talks is a way to give your members a safe, structured way to share a little bit about how they're using Ansible.

Topics

If you don't have any members who are ready to give a particular talk, the next best option is to have a member dig into a topic to learn more, and then to share that knowledge with other meetup members. Many Ansible topics can be picked up in a relatively short period of time just by reading documentation and experimenting. Some of the best meetup talks happen when one newbie walks through a topic and explains his or her experiences to other newbies.

Here's a recommended list of topics that can be useful for this purpose:

Introduction
- An Introduction to Ansible
- An Introduction to Ansible Galaxy
- Ansible and Docker
- Ansible and LXC
- Ansible and Vagrant
- Ansible and Jenkins
- Ansible and Network automation
- Ansible Tower & AWX
- Ansible and Database automation
- Ansible and Windows
Roles
- Role deep-dive: pick a role and start dissecting
- How to write a new module/role (or, how to modify someone else's module/role for your own use)
- Roles structure - What did your roles look like when you started compared to now?
- Roles best practices
- Testing roles with molecule and testinfra
Ansible Features
- Jinja2 Templates
- Groups & inventory management
- Integration with Hashicorp Vault for secret storage
- Integration with VMware
- Integration with Docker
Use case/Real world
- Ansible & Secrets (Vault, etc)
- What I wish I knew when I started
- Best practices, real life use cases
- Running at scale - tips for speeding up executions - e.g. parallelisation, tagging subsets of actions
- CI/CD pipeline
- Testing playbooks - staging, ansible-lint, yamllint
- Automate public and private clouds ( Openstack, AWS, GCP, etc )
- What I learned from using Ansible at...
Development
- Module deep-dive: pick a module and start dissecting, how to create a module
- Developing a dynamic inventory script
- Creating integration tests for your favorite modules
- Developing lookup plugins
...add your topic idea here!

Remote Speakers

There are a lot of experienced Ansible speakers all over the world -- and with teleconference/telepresence software improving all the time, remote speakers can be a good option. The following remote speakers are experts in their topics, and may be able to do a remote session with your meetup group. Feel free to reach out directly to any of the following speakers to schedule a session!

Greg DeKoenigsberg (gdk at redhat dot com) -- Just about any Ansible topic not covered below; I can hook you up with internal Red Hat speakers
Brian Coca (bcoca at redhat dot com) -- How Does Ansible Work? A Developer's Guide
Walter Bentley (wbentley at redhat dot com) -- DevOps adoption with Ansible, Ansible and OpenStack
Chris Houseknecht (house at redhat dot com) -- Ansible Container, Getting Started with AWX
Colin McCarthy (cmccarth at redhat dot com) -- Network Automation with Ansible
Jonathan Lozada De La Matta (jlozadad at redhat dot com) -- Ansible Essentials, My first experience using ansible.
David Moreau-Simard (dmsimard at redhat dot com) -- ARA Records Ansible, extending Ansible with custom modules, plugins, callbacks.
Add your name here!