Roland Wolters

Security is hard. We know what needs to be done, but configuring systems and applications, especially thousands of them, to make life more difficult for attackers is daunting. Learn to use the agentless, push-based power of Ansible to apply and enforce security standards that adapt to meet internal and external security guidelines.

In times of limited time, money, staff and overall resources, automation is essential for any IT operation to stay competitive. But too often automation focuses solely on single servers - only deploying software and configuration. But today's data center automation needs to integrate servers, services and applications with each other. And with Ansible you can address this challenge. In this session, you will learn how you can use Ansible to talk to your business application's REST API - and to develop your own Ansible modules doing just that. The presentation will cover how to talk to generic REST APIs with existing Ansible modules, best practices and common challenges, and how to write your own module to manage your business application's REST API.

SELinux is one of the key security features within Linux. It is a foundational part of many modern technologies like containers. With a history of more than 15 years, SELinux is well known among system administrators—yet too often not activated on outside facing, production systems. In this session, you'll learn how to use SELinux—from implementation through ongoing management—particularly understanding what SELinux is trying to tell you and what actions you should take based on the information. Dan Walsh, Red Hat principal security engineer (a.k.a. "Mr. SELinux"), will walk you through best practices and actual implementations, including set up and configuration, labeling, patching and maintenance, protection from hackers, and more. To bring it to life, you'll hear the implementation challenges and successes from IT.NRW, a German government IT service provider, which used SELinux to secure a 3rd party app integrated into their web environment. Today they use SELinux on over 100 servers—and you'll learn why it's worth it to deploy SELinux in your production environment, too.

Make the most out of Ansible: learn the best practices of and around Ansible. How to organize code, how to set up inventory and variables, tricks for the command line, how to improve the playbooks - and also how to bring teams together and how to use it in real life.