In-person event

Ansible Automates: Chicago

June 26, 2025 | 8:30 AM - 4:45 PM CT | Convene Willis Tower - Chicago, IL
EVENT MENU

OVERVIEW

Ansible Automates is a full-day in-person event with Ansible® experts and industry thought leaders presenting trending automation topics that will help your organization deliver the right automation strategy and achieve success in your AI adoption goals.

Red Hat® Ansible Automation Platform supports extensive possibilities and is designed with hybrid cloud infrastructure in mind. It is a flexible, scalable, and multifaceted automation solution that works across your enterprise, wherever your organization might be in its automation journey.

Why attend?

Join #AnsibleAutomates2025 to learn how to create an automation-first approach for your organization and achieve your AI adoption goals.

Who should attend?

#AnsibleAutomates2025 is for IT business leaders and their teams:

  • IT decision makers
  • IT operations leaders and managers
  • DevOps leads
  • Enterprise architects
  • IT Ops Directors, Vice Presidents
  • Chief information Officers
  • Security professionals, and anyone interested in IT automation.

If you have any questions about this event please email: infrastructure@redhat.com.

Sponsors

Platinum

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Agenda

SESSION TIME
Registration & Breakfast
8:30 - 9:15 AM

Welcome & Introduction, Intel Presentation
Damien Eversmann, Chief Architect, Red Hat - Event MC

9:15 - 9:25 AM

Automators, unite! Unlocking value in an era of disruption
Xavier Lecauchois, Senior Director, Product Management Ansible Automation Platform

In an era of disruption, automators are united by common challenges - and by the mission-critical role they have in solving them. In this opening session, we’ll outline the shared realities IT teams are facing, and explore the clear paths forward available. We’ll discuss how automation with Ansible can help your organization get more value from AI investments, unlock AIOps, and navigate virtualization disruption to modernize Day 2 operations.

You’ll come away with a new perspective on what your fellow automators are dealing with, and a clearer understanding of how you can use Red Hat Ansible to drive strategic momentum for your organization.

9:25 - 9:55 AM

A practical guide for measuring the business value of AAP
Josh Monks, Business Value Director, Red Hat
Krishna Kathiresan, Business Value Director, Red Hat

Ansible Automation Platform decreases the time to new automation capabilities by 81% and is 2.1x more cost effective than DIY automation solutions like AWX. Many organizations are looking to modernize their approach to automation and harness the value AAP delivers in terms of support, scalability, security, and performance. Josh Monks and Krishna Kathiresan from Red Hat’s Business Value Practice will guide attendees through the business value of transitioning from AWX to AAP and provide practical steps for evaluating an investment into an IT automation platform.

9:55 - 10:25 AM

Art of the Hackathon for Adoption of Ansible Automation Platform (AAP)
Harinarayan Vedam, Infrastructure Engineer, Discover/Capital One

How can we examine various levels of expertise in Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) to address a specific business problem, which results in a broader adoption of the platform?

10:25 - 10:45 AM
Morning break 10:45 - 10:55 AM

Welcome back: Red Hat + Intel

10:55 - 11:05 AM

What Are You Doing To Prepare For Your Next Security Audit?
Damien Eversmann, Chief Architect, Education, Red Hat
Francisco Ramirez, Chief Architect, State and Local Government, Red Hat
Jerry Corum, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, Ansible - Telco, Red Hat

Forget the static checklist. Using Ansible Automation Platform for continuous compliance monitoring, you will gain proactive peace of mind, knowing your environment consistently adheres to your chosen standards throughout its entire lifecycle. Further, allow Red Hat to act as your intelligent security advisor, identifying vulnerabilities and configuration drifts. Integrated seamlessly with our automation platform to dynamically group affected systems and orchestrate rapid, efficient remediation based on the expert knowledge of Red Hat's support team.

Join us as we discuss Red Hat’s comprehensive approach to address these challenges through automation. By implementing "Compliance as Code" and integrating tools like OpenSCAP, Satellite, Insights, and Advanced Cluster Management, manual tasks are reduced, enabling consistent security control enforcement, automated scanning, vulnerability monitoring, and policy-based governance. This unified automation platform helps accelerate threat response, streamline audits, reduce misconfiguration risks, and build a DevSecOps culture, simplifying the journey to institutionalized security automation and delivering proven business value.

11:05 - 11:40 AM

A Journey into Network Security Automation: "Why Can't You Just...?"
Franklin Wong, Senior Principal Product Owner, Discover/Capital One
Ronak Trivedi, Senior Associate Cybersecurity Engineer, Discover/Capital One

How many times have we heard the phrase: why can't you just...? Where do we start with automating "all the things" as well? When you're stepping into new territory, these questions can be extremely intimidating. Join us as we tell our story from dipping our toes into Terraform and plain Python for basic AWS interaction to leveraging Ansible to automate firewall policy management.

11:40 AM - 12:05 PM

Partner panel: Delivering on the full promise of IT automation
Moderator: Jered Cortez, Ansible Ecosystem Lead, Red Hat

As the complexities of modern infrastructure, applications, security, and hybrid cloud environments continue to grow, IT organizations will require a comprehensive automation strategy. Join this session to gain insights from leading IT leaders on how they're expediting business outcomes and optimizing workloads to fulfill the potential of IT automation.

12:05 - 12:30 PM
Lunch break
12:30 - 1:30 PM
Ansible Automation Platform Labs: “A Day in the Life of an Automator”

Lab 1: Introspection and Planning (Day-0)
Mike Dahlgren, Senior Manager, Specialist Solution Architecture, Red Hat
Adam Mack, Assoc. Principal Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Shadd Gallegos, Assoc. Principal Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Nick Arellano, Senior Solutions Architect, Red Hat
Zach Leblanc, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, Red Hat

You are new to automating and would like to leverage AAP to gather information around various infrastructure (“safe” read-only activities). Let’s leverage automation to find out more about what we have in order to gain insights into what can and should be done next!

Lab 2: Standardizing Deployments with Workflows (Day-1)
Let’s proceed with deploying and verifying a new application to production. We’ll create a workflow that reuses existing templates that have been provided already by the different teams to build out their production environments.

1:30 - 2:30 PM
Afternoon break 2:30 - 2:45 PM

Lab 3: Enhancing Operational Efficiencies (Day-2)
Once you have successfully deployed a production environment, we want to ensure we can leverage the business benefits by introducing better methods of automating and using Event-Driven Ansible to safeguard mission critical components such as your delivery network or application.

2:45 - 4:00 PM
Regulated Industries Track

Best Practices around Ansible Playbook Development
Adebisi Oyawale, Senior Specialist Adoption Architect - Ansible, Red Hat

In this interactive session, you will see an end-to-end developer journey. Everything will be covered from setting up a repeatable developer environment to testing and code promotion best practices. At the end of the session, we will share the code snippets so you can kickstart your implementation of an end-to-end developer journey in your organization.

1:30 - 2:30 PM
Afternoon break 2:30 - 2:45 PM

NEW FEATURE: Policy as Code
Joon Paik, Senior Specialist Solution Architect, Ansible

How do you enforce best practices? How can you prevent the use of automation against certain environments? How can you restrict the usage of imperative automation? How can you enforce that passwordless authentication is used?

The new policy as code feature will allow you to do all of these things and more. After a short presentation of this new feature, you will get a look at what policy as code looks like in action and helps you build a more secure and structured automation platform.

2:45 - 3:30 PM

AAP Architectures for large regulated institutions
Chad Ferman, Senior Principal Product Manager - Ansible

Large regulated institutions run automation at scale and have specific regulatory requirements. Red Hat now offers validated architectures for AAP. Our client architecture team will also share unique insights and approaches around high availability and implementation models for automation at scale.

3:30 - 4:00 PM
Networking reception
4:00 - 4:45 PM

*Agenda topics and timeframes are subject to change*

Location
Convene Willis Tower
233 S Wacker Dr
Chicago, Illinois 60606

Convene entrance: Convene is located on the 3rd Floor of Willis Tower. We recommend entering the venue from the 233 S Wacker main lobby. From this entrance you will go up the stairs to the 2nd Floor mezzanine and take a right towards the Willis Tower security desk. Past security you will see a drop down sign for Convene next to a large stairwell that leads to the 3rd Floor Meetings location. There is an elevator located behind the stairwell as another point of access to the Meetings floor.

Date: June 26, 2025
Time: Thursday, 8:30 AM - 4:45 PM (UTC-05:00) Central Time (US & Canada)
Any questions? Reach out to infrastructure@redhat.com.

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