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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January 31, 2025
The next few days are shaping up to be packed with open-source goodness!
I’ll be heading to CentOS Connect, FOSDEM, and CfgMgmtCamp, three of the best events in the ecosystem.
These conferences always include a great mix of technical talks, hallway conversations, and spontaneous meetups with friends—both old and new.
If you’re around, let’s catch up!
CentOS Connect (Brussels, January 31)
Although the event run yesterday and today, I’ll only be able to attend today.
CentOS Connect is a small but incredibly valuable event where the wider CentOS community (Fedora, CentOS, and all the Enterprise Linux distros) meets to discuss the space’s present and future.
It’s a great opportunity to meet contributors, learn about upcoming changes, and exchange ideas with people who shape the CentOS ecosystem.
I really like this event because its atmosphere is similar to Flock: very casual and more like a friends’ gathering than a conference.
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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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June 17, 2024
I took the EX358 exam a few years back and therefore it recently expired.
Since the exam is still available, I decided to take it again to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation certification and, therefore, extend my Red Hat Certified Architect certification.
This time around, I had the impression that the exam had changed quite a bit from the last time I took it.
While the previous time the exam reminded me mostly of an Ansible certification, this time it reminded me way more of the old RHCE exam (the EX300).
The bulk of the exam was about configuring the various services, while in the previous version, there was a lot more focus on the Ansible part, which is more like the EX294.
It is also true that EX300 was phasing out at the time, but it was still an exam many people had, while EX294 was fairly new.
However, as I suggested the previous time, it is still crucial to be able to perform all configurations manually and with Ansible because you can not know what you will be tasked to perform manually and what you will be tasked to perform using Ansible.
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Published on September 29, 2023
Authored by James Freeman, Fabio Alessandro Locati, Daniel Oh
Published by Packt Publishing Limited
Ansible empowers you to automate a myriad of tasks, including software provisioning, configuration management, infrastructure deployment, and application rollouts. It can be used as a deployment tool as well as an orchestration tool. While Ansible provides simple yet powerful features to automate multi-layer environments using agentless communication, it can also solve other critical IT challenges, such as ensuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with zero downtime.
In this book, you’ll work with the latest release of Ansible and learn how to solve complex issues quickly with the help of task-oriented scenarios. You’ll start by installing and configuring Ansible on Linux and macOS to automate monotonous and repetitive IT tasks and learn concepts such as playbooks, inventories, and roles. As you progress, you’ll gain insight into the YAML syntax and learn how to port between Ansible versions. Additionally, you’ll understand how Ansible enables you to orchestrate multi-layer environments such as networks, containers, and the cloud.
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Buy it on Packt
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September 18, 2023
One of the aspects that I have always loved about Ansible is that it integrates very nicely with the rest of the system where it is running.
For example, you can easily configure all the SSH configurations directly by changing the ~/.ssh/config file.
I’ve seen multiple cases where the SSH configuration file needs to be tweaked.
A case that comes up occasionally is an environment configured in a way that requires Ansible to use a different SSH key for each machine it manages.
I’m aware that this is not an ideal setup since it is not increasing the security as much as the person who came up with such a rule was expecting.
Still, it is a requirement that some companies have for various historical reasons and, usually, it is impossible or impractical to challenge.
However, the same process applies to any other SSH connection tweaking that can be performed in the SSH configuration file, such as proxies, ciphers, host checks, etc.
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August 31, 2023
A few weeks ago, I passed the Red Hat EX467 exam, which allowed me to become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Managing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform.
As of today, this is the newest Red Hat exam on Ansible.
You can notice this from the version of Ansible Automated Platform that this exam uses: 2.2.
An aspect that is already clear by looking at the objective is that this exam is completely complementary to the EX294 exam.
In fact, the EX294 focuses on how to write Ansible code.
In contrast, the EX467 focuses on leveraging the Ansible Automation Platform to ensure that Ansible automation can be effectively used in enterprise environments.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog