Ansible Essentials

This course is designed as a journey through configuring a realistic application stack from the ground up using Ansible and working with your colleagues, playing different roles in the topology. It is divided into nine sections starting with the initial installation and general concepts. Each section has practice sessions and exercises to help you further strengthen your skills

The final goal of the training is to have a working HTTP server load-balancing topology.

• How to use Ansible to automate tasks
• How to create playbooks and configurations for Ansible
• Understand how to benefit from Ansible automation
• Purpose solutions based on Ansible
• Debug/understand an Ansible project designed by someone else

Ansible Fundamentals

• What is Ansible?
• Where does Ansible fit in a DevOps environment?
• How could Ansible help you automate different tasks?

Key Components

• Playbooks: The main ansible component
• Roles: Reusable components
• Tasks: The main component of a Playbook
• Inventory: Our targets

Installing Ansible

• Using distro package manager
• Cloning the GIT directly

How Ansible Works

• Where does each component fit?
• Good practices, from a DevOps perspective
• Practical examples/scenarios

Ansible Inventory

• Hosts, groups, dynamic inventory in a cloud-based environment

Ansible Modules

• Modules already available in Ansible
• Most used modules
• Examples, why not to write code when there is already a module for that

Ansible Tower/AWX

• A brief description of the Open Source AWX / Tower
• Explaining the license and advantages of using AWX or Tower

Basic Examples

• Running commands, doing basic sanity checks
• Configuring the inventory
• Running commands on remote hosts

Hands on Practice

• Executing a playbook on your own host