James Freeman
James Freeman is a published author and Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, bringing over 25 years of technology expertise to the table. With more than a decade of hands-on experience, James has tackled complex enterprise challenges in real-world production environments using Ansible, often introducing this powerful automation tool to CTOs and organizations for the first time. As the author of five authoritative books on Ansible, James is a recognized thought leader in IT automation. His expertise extends to facilitating tailored Ansible workshops and training sessions, and he is a sought-after speaker, having presented at international conferences and community meetups. James's passion for empowering others through automation continues to inspire engineers and businesses to unlock new possibilities in IT.
Sessions
Born of a real world requirement from an EDA customer, this session details how you can use Python and Boto3 to modify the kernel command line parameters on first boot of an EC2 instance. This is something that according to conventional wisdom "cannot be done", and is only possible on the second boot. Yet on in a large compute environment, every second of billable runtime matters, both to keep costs down, and improve overall runtimes. With a little inventiveness and a little open source magic, is actually entirely possible to achieve this efficiency, and in this session I will show you how.
As automation becomes ever more important, safe and secure management of secrets is paramount. It is vital that secrets are managed in a secure, centralized manner and that control is thus maintained over them. In this session we will explore the integration of Ansible with Conjur Open Source, and how this lends itself perfectly to secure, centralized secrets management. As a bonus, we'll even explore how Conjur Open Source can be used in a wider context to provide secrets to other platforms, and even rotation of credentials on a Linux server can be managed.
Already successfully presented at both the London Ansible MeetUp and AnsibleFest 2021, this newly revised session (adapted to the exciting Ignite format) aims to promote interest and excitement in the field of positive psychology, and demonstrate how you don't need to work in this field to benefit from it. In fact, the design of Ansible directly supports positive psychology, and in this session I will demonstrate how.
SELinux is such an important part of your security posture, and with data breaches becoming more frequent and significant, it is now more important than ever to ensure you have taken every precaution to secure your environment. Unfortunately, SELinux is one of those technologies that strikes fear into the heart of so many, with a large number of people still disabling it to work around issues. In this hands on workshop, we will start from a ground up implementation of an SELinux policy, taking you through its background, why you should be considering it, and how to build up (and debug) a policy from nothing for a custom application of our own creation.