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Ansible Fundamentals in 3 Hours

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Ansible is the leading open source configuration management, provisioning, and deployment tool that enables administrators to standardize and simplify systems management. It’s highly valued by administrators for its relatively simple but very powerful automation capacity and because it’s platform-agnostic. Ansible improves and ensures system stability and leads to reduced workload and greater cost-effectiveness by automating and simplifying repetitive, complex, and tedious operations and by streamlining the configuration of large numbers of servers.

Join Ansible expert Ton Kersten to get a handle on configuration management concepts and basic Ansible skills such as how to run ad hoc commands and create and run playbooks. Ton will walk you through basic YAML syntax, Ansible templates, and the templating engine Jinja2. And you’ll mix it up with Ansible on your own in a lab environment doing some fundamental tasks.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

  • Configuration management (CM) concepts
  • The Ansible configuration file
  • Ansible functionality
  • Ansible modules and documentation
  • Static inventory
  • Ad hoc commands
  • Playbooks and templates

And you’ll be able to:

  • Create a static inventory
  • Issue ad hoc commands
  • Create a small playbook
  • Deploy a basic template

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a system administrator who manages multiple systems that require automation.
  • You work with a lot of systems and want to make management more feasible.
  • You’re a DevOps engineer who wants to grasp configuration management concepts and Ansible in particular.

Prerequisites

  • A sandboxed virtual lab environment will be provided. To access the lab environment and participate in the exercises, you'll need a terminal that can connect over SSH (i.e., run the command ssh username@host.example.com). Login credentials will be provided at the start of the course.
  • Familiarity with systems management
  • Experience with Unix or Linux (useful but not required)

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Configuration management and Ansible (10 minutes)

  • Presentation: What is configuration management?; What’s Ansible and why is it used?
  • Q&A

Inventory, modules, and ad hoc commands (55 minutes)

  • Presentation: Ansible’s static inventory; using the Ansible modules; finding the module documentation; issuing ad hoc commands
  • Hands-on exercise: Log in to lab environment; inspect a static Ansible inventory; issue ad hoc commands against a node under Ansible control
  • Q&A
  • Break

Ansible playbooks (55 minutes)

  • Presentation: Basics of YAML configuration language; overview of a basic Ansible playbook, including facts and variables
  • Hands-on exercise: Create a small playbook that installs and removes software on a node; install and start a web server
  • Q&A
  • Break

Ansible templates (50 minutes)

  • Presentation: The Jinja2 templating engine; a basic Ansible template
  • Hands-on exercises: Create a basic Ansible template; render template with Ansible playbook; create a playbook for installing a basic web page for a web server
  • Q&A

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Your Instructor

Ton Kersten

Ton Kersten is a Linux consultant and trainer at AT Computing in the Netherlands, since 2001, where he helps customers with all kinds of Linux challenges. He also tries to teach them the Linux and Ansible way of life.

Ton has been addicted to UNIX since 1986 and to Linux since 1992 and he started using Ansible in June 2012 (even before the Ansible company was founded) and has been contributing to the Ansible code since November 2012.

As an Ansible Ambassador, Ansible meetup organiser and Ansible contributor he is deeply immersed in the Ansible community and a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups about Ansible and configuration management in general.

He enjoys music, playing darts (badly), good food, beer and whisky.

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Skill covered

Ansible