Title: Exploring Automation and Collaboration at the Ansible London Meetup 2024

On November 21, 2024, London’s vibrant DevOps community is gathering once again for an exciting night of learning, networking, and collaboration at the Ansible London Meetup. Hosted by John Barker and fellow organizers, this event is set to take place at Dell Technologies' office in central London. It’s an evening that promises deep dives into automation practices, innovative approaches, and practical demonstrations—an absolute must for anyone passionate about Ansible, infrastructure as code, and DevOps.

Event Details at a Glance

  • Location: Dell Technologies, 1 Creechurch Place, London, EC3A 5AF
  • Time: 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
  • Nearby Stations: Liverpool Street, Aldgate East, and Fenchurch Street

With doors opening at 6:00 PM, attendees will have the chance to meet fellow DevOps enthusiasts, share insights, and explore the latest trends in configuration management and automation.

Agenda and Key Highlights

The evening kicks off at 6:30 PM with a series of insightful presentations from industry experts. These sessions cover a range of topics designed to enhance your knowledge of Ansible, from streamlining repetitive tasks to achieving compliance and provisioning virtual private servers (VPS) efficiently. Here’s a closer look at the talks:

#### 1. Let’s Use RAG for Ansible Coding and Say Goodbye to Tedious Tasks

Speaker: Benoît Fabre

Benoît Fabre will be sharing how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is transforming the way Ansible developers can streamline documentation and improve testing processes. By injecting custom Ansible repositories as context into large language models, RAG allows for more accurate and relevant outputs, enabling developers to tackle complex tasks with greater efficiency. This talk will explore the technical aspects of RAG, its applications, and real-world examples of how it reduces developer workload while improving documentation quality.

#### 2. Infrastructure as Code: VPS Provisioning and Configuration on Hetzner Cloud

Speaker: Daniel Brennand

Daniel Brennand brings a practical demonstration of how to use Ansible for VPS provisioning on Hetzner Cloud, showcasing the dynamic inventory plugin from the hetzner.hcloud collection. This demo will walk participants through the steps of configuring a VPS using Ansible, detailing the automation advantages and best practices for seamless deployment. It’s a session ideal for those interested in cloud automation and infrastructure as code.

#### 3. Achieving Compliance Through Ansible-Lockdown

Speaker: Mark Bolwell

Compliance is a critical aspect of any DevOps strategy, and Mark Bolwell’s talk will guide attendees on how to leverage Ansible-Lockdown for OS baseline compliance. Covering what compliance requirements can be met, the “why” behind writing these configurations, and a hands-on demonstration, Mark will