About Ansible
Ansible is a software tool for server and infrastructure automation. It allows its users to manage Infrastructure as Code (IaC), by keeping all configuration and setup in specially crafted files. Those files can later on be applied to single or multiple servers. Ansible has automation support for different software, devices, cloud providers and services (i.e. API), which makes it suitable for provisioning, configuration management, deployment and various other scenarios and tasks.
Being able to use Ansible for automation, allows you to solve simple and complex tasks related to infrastructure, and reduces the knowledge gap to other automation and DevOps solutions.
Coarse goal
The goal of this course is to teach users the basics of Ansible and to help them acquire initial practical experience with it. The expected final objective is users to be able to solve simple and moderate tasks with Ansible like:
- working with playbooks and inventories
- data, variables and facts manipulation and usage
- debugging playbook issues
- parallel and serial execution
- installing and using additional modules
- configuring single and multiple servers
- and so on.
This course is intended for novice Ansible users, who either have very little experience with it or none at all. However, additional information, knowledge and skills might be required to understand more easily and apply the concepts of the course. The coarse is best suited for more advanced users, that have some understanding on the topics of operating system, security or shell scripting. Still, the course might be suitable for novice users without full understanding of the topics mentioned, but the learning curve will be much steeper.