Fundamentals of Ansible — Part I

In a world where automation is king, when it comes to configuration management, Ansible rules. Ansible, an open-source project from RedHat allows you to automate configuration including installing software, applying security patches, managing networks across the whole spectrum—be that locally, on-prem, in the cloud.

In this exercise driven session, we’ll learn Ansible from the ground up. We’ll see how to declare your inventory, use modules to run arbitrary tasks on hosts, collect related tasks into playbooks, make reusable units of work using roles, and how to use variables. By the end of this session, you will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of how Ansible works, and how you can start to use it to automate away the mundane.

Detailed agenda:

• Why Ansible?
• How does Ansible work?
• Ansible characteristics
• Run ansible for the first time
• Run an ansible module with args
• Escalating privileges
• Keeping track of your inventory
• Groups of groups (of groups?)
• Variables, specifically inventory variables
• Extracting group and host variables into group/host variable files
• Plays and playbooks
• Our first play
• Environment specific variables
• Making a useful playbook
• Jinja2 string interpolation
• Roles
• Using ansible.builtin.copy and ansible.builtin.template in roles
• Using handlers
• Using Ansible facts and filters
• Using Ansible data-structures
• Using tags
• Encrypting passwords using ansible-vault
• Checking your scripts
• Benefits of Ansible
• Trade-offs