Karyn Cassio

By day I am a Senior Consultant automating things, using the power of Ansible, for Red Hat customers. Posts related to my automation work can be found here.

Karyn has been working in different areas of Information Technology for over 30 years. She started her career serving in the United States Air Force, where she came to discover she was “good at computers”. After separating from the service in 1992, with an honorable discharge, she wanted to pursue an IT career, but had no idea where to start. (This was when Microsoft and Windows were in their infancy.) After working as an admin assistant initially, and then an office manager, she starting becoming the “office expert” in all things computers, and started attending California Lutheran University for her Computer Science degree.

Initially Karyn worked small jobs, for small companies, doing everything from admin work, to pulling network cables, and cabling small networks. After graduating with her BSCS she joined her first large corporation where she was a Solaris Unix Administrator. While working there she received her MBAA from Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business, and continued to work as a systems administrator.

Karyn moved to more web development after taking three years off to be a stay-at-home mom for her only son. This is when she found Drupal. She spent quite a few years making a name for herself in the Drupal community, and leading the Women in Drupal community group. After working in Drupal for sometime, and in different organizations, she discovered the wonderful world of DevOps, which was a perfect combination of her roots in sys admin, and her development work.

Karyn created her first Ansible workflow while employed at CU Boulder. Automating the software lifecycle of the housing websites deployment workflow. This was her first experience with Ansible and she was impressed, and knew that’s where she wanted to focus, devops and automation.

Unfortunately, her next opportunity took her away from Ansible, and to the world of Puppet, for the next five (5) years, until she was recruited to work at Red Hat as a Senior Consultant. Since coming to Red Hat in late 2021 she has made sure every customer engagement she has been on included Ansible in some capacity. Now she is officially on the automation team, so it’s all Ansible and Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) all the time, and she couldn’t be happier.