Ansible is one of the most popular and powerful ways to work with infrastructure-as-code. It can be used for many purposes, like system configuration, provisioning, orchestration and more. After following this course, you will know all that ansible has to offer, and will be able to write playbooks to manage your infrastructure.
2 days
ansibleAnyone with basic experience managing systems manually
Cover all core feature of Ansible so that participants will be able to provision, configure, and manage systems.
In-classroom or virtual. The entire course is hands-on with lots of exercises using a cloud-based set of virtual machines to practice with.
Outline
Day 1, morning
Intro
- Course intro, overview, introductions
- Ansible intro
First steps
- Ansible inventory and hosts file
- The ansible configuration file
- Understanding ssh key-based authentication
- Running single ansible modules from the command line
- YAML introduction (incl. dicts, lists, understanding indentation)
Tools
- Ansible-navigator
- Ansible-lint
Day 1, afternoon
Modules
- Understanding modules
- Setting module parameters and desired state
- Overview of available modules
- Deploying files
- Managing Packages (linux)
- Managing users (linux)
- Managing Services (linux)
- Overview of windows modules
- Overview of networking modules
- Overview of storage modules
Playbooks
- Playbooks: running multiple tasks against a group of hosts
- Correctly aligning blocks
- Host patterns and groups
- Super user and become
Facts, variables, logic
- Facts
- Custom facts
- Variables, host variables
- Using variables (conditionals; debug msg)
- Loops
Day 2, morning
Jinja
- Understanding Jinja templates (mainly variables, for/if, filters)
- Deploying templates
- Using jinja features in playbooks
More about tasks and playbooks
- Best practices
- Running shell commands
- Setting variables based on module results/output
- Handlers
- Error handling
Day 2, afternoon
Roles
- Creating roles
- Directory layout of a Role (vars, files, tasks, handlers)
- Dependencies, include and import
- Ansible Galaxy
Advanced topics
- Using Ansible Vault
- Optimizing execution speed and async tasks
- Overview of ansible automation platform
Not covered
- Writing a custom ansible module in python