July 9, 2026
Last Friday, I renewed my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Managing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform (EX467) certification.
As I’m already a Red Hat Certified Architect and have passed this same exam about three years ago, I wasn’t too worried about it.
The exam still focuses on leveraging the Ansible Automation Platform in enterprise environments rather than writing Ansible code, which remains the domain of the EX294.
Compared to three years ago, the platform version has been updated, but the overall structure and approach felt familiar.
Timewise, the exam continues to be completable well within the allocated time if you have enough experience with the platform.
This time it took me 1 hour and 38 minutes to go through it.
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June 25, 2026
Podman 6.0 was released yesterday.
This is a fairly big and important release, since they removed the support for cgroups v1, iptables, CNI, slirp4netns, and BoltDB.
All features that depend on those dependencies have not been dropped; they are only supporting the modern replacements that have been available and the defaults for a while.
In fact, they are now provided by cgroups v2, nftables, Netavark, Pasta, and SQLite, respectively.
I have been running Podman on my personal infrastructure for a few years now, mostly using Quadlet to manage services through Systemd.
Personally, I do not envision any impact for me, since I already use all the new alternatives.
Similarly, all other Fedora users should have a fairly smooth upgrade, unless they forced any of the removed options in their config, which should be very rare.
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May 31, 2026
Last weekend, I updated and rebooted the system, but it did not come back online.
Checking with IPMI revealed that the ata-2 disk was not responding to the operating system, preventing a clean mount of the Btrfs filesystem and halting the system from completing the boot sequence.
My Btrfs array is composed of 6 SSD disks, all with different ages, except for the first two, which arrived together at the beginning.
So, I was not overly concerned with one of the original disks failing.
Sooner or later, it would have happened, and I was ready for it.
Also, I set all data, metadata, and system to be RAID 1, so no data was at risk.
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April 30, 2026
Three days ago, the Fedora project released Fedora 44.
This release was delayed a couple of times due to an issue with the NVIDIA driver and installer.
Since neither of those was relevant to me, I was not blocked by that.
I appreciate that Fedora caters to many different kinds of users and use cases, and therefore, there might be delays for reasons that do not affect me.
I’ve used Fedora 44 on my laptop for months, but prefer stable versions for servers.
The difference is due to the greater simplicity of rolling back on laptops compared to server systems.
Since I use bootc on all my Fedora systems, it is enough to select the old version in grub if something goes wrong.
But since the servers are headless, changing the grub selection might require finding a display and keyboard.
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March 31, 2026
Over the last 20+ years in IT, I’ve seen automation evolve from a nice-to-have to a non-negotiable part of how organizations operate.
Every company I’ve worked with has some form of automation.
The problem is that, in many cases, what they have is not an automation strategy but rather a collection of individual scripts, cron jobs, and one-off solutions that were built to solve immediate problems.
This is what I usually call ad-hoc automation or point automation, and while it works in the short term, it creates significant issues over time.
This does not happen only in small or particularly tech-adverse companies; it is a very common situation across sectors and sizes.
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February 27, 2026
Over the last 20+ years in IT, I’ve been lucky enough to work across many roles and industries.
In that time, I’ve always found that the work we do, and that we’re measured against, is only one side of the story.
The other side, and often the most important one, is the work we share: the ideas, the rationale, the reasoning, the reflections that shape how others think.
That is what thought leadership is about, why it matters more than ever in our industry, and why I started and continue doing it.
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January 20, 2026
Yesterday, I passed the Red Hat EX188 exam, which allowed me to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers certification.
I had a very good memory of this exam from the last time I took it, so I was happy to go through it again.
Different from last time, I did encounter some difficulties with the last exercise, which was a little surprising to me, since the last time I found it testing the same capabilities as a walk in the park, but maybe this time I simply started with the wrong foot.
This obviously had no major impact on my exam, allowing me to easily achieve and exceed the required score to pass.
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December 29, 2025
After a few years of experimenting, I moved forward with a full electrical system rewiring in my house earlier this year, opting for a KNX-based design.
One of the aspects I really like about KNX is that it is a brand-agnostic protocol, which makes it very easy to find any kind of object compatible with it.
Another aspect that KNX has, different from many other options, is that it is it bus based.
Being bus-based is a huge pain when you have to install it, but once you have done it, the experience is way better, since there is no perceptible delay, no risk of interference, etc., making the day-to-day experience indistinguishable from a traditionally cabled system.
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November 13, 2025
Earlier this month, I sat the Red Hat EX374 exam to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Developing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform certification.
As I’m already a Red Hat Certified Architect and have passed this same exam a couple of years ago, I wasn’t too worried about it.
Still, it is always interesting to see how exams evolve.
When I registered for the exam, I quickly checked the Objectives and remembered that it covered both Ansible core content (playbooks, modules, roles) and a lot of Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) capabilities, such as controllers, collections, and execution environments.
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October 16, 2025
Three years passed from the last AWS exam I took, and my AWS certifications were due for renewal.
The first thing I checked was the exam code, which I had taken three years ago.
It turns out that last time I took the SAA-C03, and this time I would also have taken the same exam.
This time around, I considered doing the SAP-C02 instead, but, given the very limited time, I decided on the SAA-C03.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog