IT Automation for Java Engineers with Sandra Parsick and Jonas Hecht
On 28th of September the Java User Group Thüringen met at the Kombinat Süd, a coworking space in Jena close to the train station, which faces towards Weimar and Erfurt. We had over 20 visitors amongst them two special guests and patrons of our user group: Prof. Dr. Steffen Avemarg (Applied University Erfurt) and Prof. Dr. Norbert Siegmund (University Weimar), which are leading in Mobile Development and Intelligent Systems using Java of course.
The first talk about Automation with Ansible and not just Docker was given by Sandra Parsick, a well-received software crafter. We were honored that we could hear her talk for the first time ever and gather some feedback in exchange for the wonderful experience. After explaining the basics of Ansible playbooks she showed very many different uses cases with code snippets and a 4 step model that she developed on her own on how to migrate to a fully automated setup in any industry environment with different teams working together.
After that she went off with it to the JUG Saxony Day and many other hugh conferences where she was already booked and people have to pay for hearing what she has to say. Here you can find the slides and the code samples of her Ansible talk.
After a short break where we could enjoy cold beer on the wonderful terrace of the lounge area outside Jonas Hecht followed up with a second talk on IT automation as well. He explained his experiences and a solution to the challenges of a recent business project where he served as a lead architect.
The project required Windows machines as a basis so he decided to use Ansible and Packer to spin up a virtualized windows environment via Vagrant and VirtualBox to finally deploy dockerized Windows containers that would eventually run tiny Spring Boot Microservices that could also talk to the outside world and which were connected via a rather complicated Spring Cloud Netflix setup. Many quirks and features were shown as well as the beauty of dealing with licence management and the open source version of the Ansible Tower. Here are the slides.
Besides that the Softwerkskammer Jena recorded both talks and put them up on YouTube. We can definitely recommend to watch them. Enjoy!!!
