Red Hat Summit 2017

Red Hat Summit 2017

Red Hat Summit 2017 concluded two weeks ago but I am just now getting an opportunity to sit down and write about my experience there. I've been a road warrier lately and was only home for a day and a half and then off to the Fedora Infrastructure Hackathon (but more on that later), then once I got home "for good" I've been attempting to play a game of catch-up.

So here it goes...

Red Hat Summit is without doubt one of my favorite events of the year because I am an extremely proud Red Hatter and I love that we have such an opportunity to show off the latest and greatest that we have to offer the community, our customers, and the world at large. This year was bigger and better than ever, we were in a new (larger) venue at the BCEC, broke our previous attendance record, broke our sponsorship record, and had more sessions and labs than ever before as well. Something else I loved, as it's near and dear to my heart, is that the Community Central portion of the Expo hall was front and center in the main "center stage" so the likes of Fedora, CentOS, Ansible, Gluster, Ceph, Foreman, ManageIQ, oVirt, Project Atomic, OpenShift Origin, and many others had an opportunity to share the spotlight with all the pillars of the Red Hat Technology Portfolio. Another favorite of mine was the portion of the Expo Hall dedicated to customer feedback of current and next-gen still-in-development products as this was certainly the best outlet we could possibly ask for to get real focused feedback from those who spent large portions of their lives with our software.

This year was a bit different for me, I'll often spend a lot of time working the Fedora Community booth in the Expo Hall during Red Hat Summit; which is something I genuinely enjoy doing because it gives me the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about all the things that we mutually find interesting about the innovations going on within the platform. However, I didn't have as much time as usual to dedicate to that as I was an extremely busy bee this year as I found myself with five speaking slots. I created a lab around RPM Packaging that is titled, "From Source to RPM in 120 Minutes" which is effectively a "downstream" instructor-led lab based version of the RPM Packaging Guide that I wrote. I've had a lot of fun doing it in the past and hope to get to continue doing it at future Red Hat Summits. My lab ran each of the three days of Summit and as you may have noticed from the title, those are two hours each session. Then I had two other speaking engagements. First, a Fedora "Birds of a Feather" Session where I lead the conversation with other members of the Fedora Project around current developments, where the project was going, and sparked conversations for feedback from the users and various community members in the room about what aspects of The Project are most important to them. Finally, I co-presented a great talk with an extremely kind human being by the name of Nicolas FANJEAU who works for Airbus, the session was called "Ansible All the Things" where I talked about a wide array of things you can accomplish with Ansible from the traditional to the unorthadox and then Nicolas gave a real world example of how he and his team at Airbus are actually doing a lot of those things (including wiring up Ansible Tower to Service Now) to improve efficiency within their Enterprise and actually deliver aircraft faster as a side effect. It was great fun and I hope to get a chance to work with Nicolas again in the future.

From there I had multiple customer engagements where we discussed their use of Red Hat Container Technologies such as OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host are solving real world business needs and helping to advise on best practices around those technologies. These kind of interactions are again something I really enjoy getting an opportunity to do because it gives me a good perspective on how people are putting the technology to use that I have the good fortune as a member of the Fedora Engineering Team to work on and work with upstream.

There were also many many wonderful Red Hat Announcements, so many I've forgotten at least half of them. I highly recommend you checkout the website to find out more if you're interested.

Closing time

All in all I was exhausted by the end of the week and looking forward to getting back to a more normal level of chaos ... except I still had that hackathon to get to. ;)

Until next time...