Automation
November 6, 2026
For many years, I have managed all my systems with Ansible.
For a similar amount of time, I have used Nebula as my VPN of choice, so I can always connect securely to all my systems, even on the move.
There are no official Ansible modules for Nebula, so over the years many people asked me how I manage it.
I changed my approach over time.
Although my previous iterations worked, I wasn’t satisfied enough to share the details.
I’m now at a point where I think the process is fairly good, so here I am.
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October 24, 2026
I’ve used Ansible for more than 10 years, and one problem I’ve seen everyone deal with is handling secrets in Ansible.
Many people put them in the code, but since Ansible code often ends up in Git, that means adding secrets to Git repositories, which you should avoid at all costs.
Ansible Vault is a good solution, since it lets you encrypt files.
I’ve used Ansible Vault for many years, but I think it has 2 major limitations.
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August 17, 2026
Over the last year, I’ve watched AI models and tools that find vulnerabilities in code take a central role in security industry communications.
Every few weeks, a new product announcement promises impressive results, such as AI tools that detect SQL injection, spot memory corruption bugs, identify logic flaws at scale, or chain tens of known vulnerabilities together.
This can be impressive for attack purposes, but it is more an interesting novelty than defensive security.
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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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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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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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August 31, 2025
Last week, I renewed my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation (EX457) 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.
Since I did not remember the kind of content that was there last time, I read the objectives page and assumed it would have been more on the networking side.
But, in reality, the exam leaned much more toward Ansible playbooks, modules, and automation patterns than network-specific plumbing.
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May 31, 2025
In the coming couple of weeks I’ll be heading to the Common Europe Congress (CEC2025), Flock 2025, and DevConf.cz 2025, some of the best community-driven events in the ecosystem.
If you’re around, let’s catch up and share stories over coffee!
Common Europe Congress 2025 (Gothenburg, June 2–4)
The Common Europe Congress is the largest educational convention for IBM Power users in Europe.
This year it’s taking place at the Gothia Towers in Gothenburg, Sweden.
I’ll be there from June 2nd through the 4th, and I have two sessions lined up:
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March 31, 2025
For a while now, I’ve been looking into optimizing and reorganizing some of the infrastructure that powers my self-hosting services.
After evaluating a few alternatives, Scaleway’s Dedibox lineup caught my attention: it is a European company with good hardware and decent pricing.
However, as with every good solution, it is not perfect.
Scaleway does not provide Fedora as an OS option for their Dedibox machines.
They offer a decent selection, including Rocky Linux, Debian, and Ubuntu — but no Fedora.
Now, if you know me, you know that Fedora is not just my distro of choice — it’s the one I trust for both personal and professional projects.
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July 31, 2024
Last month, the Ansible Forum had a discussion about potential changes that might be implemented in AWX.
One aspect that immediately hit me was the decision to move from SemVer to CalVer.
More specifically, what struck me was the focus on this change in the initial post and in the comments.
Since it took me a while to formulate a whole reasoning behind my perspective, I created this blog post to explain my thought process better.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog