Mastering Ansible

A complete guide to configuration management and orchestration with Ansible.

Created by: Chris Lunsford
Software Founder, Developer, Operations Engineer

What Will I Learn?

• Execute ad-hoc commands against servers using Ansible
• Write Ansible configuration playbooks to deploy a 3-tier web application
• Configure Ansible roles with tasks, handlers, files, templates, and default variables
• Write operational playbooks to check cluster status and perform a cluster restart.
• Optimize Ansible playbooks to reduce playbook execution time.
• Test and troubleshoot Ansible playbook execution.

Requirements

• You should have a Linux or Mac OS X computer, or access to at lease one Linux virtual machine for installing Ansible.
• You'll need a code editor or IDE of your choice.
• You'll need a terminal and ssh client for running Ansible against target hosts.
• You should have access to 5 Linux servers (bare-metal or virtual machine) if you want to setup the course environment and follow along step-by-step.

Target audience

• The course is designed for students who have little or no experience with Ansible, but are familiar with Linux systems administration concepts.
• No programming or previous automation experience is required.
• If you've never logged into a Linux shell and run commands before, you will learn the Ansible syntax but you may not understand the 'why' behind the tasks that we configure. We try to explain all systems concept that we cover, but we aren't starting from the beginning with Linux in this course.