What is Ansible?

Getting Started With Ansible

Cloud platforms, on-prem servers, dozens of operating systems, more language and frameworks than you can count, and you have to manage it all!

These days even the "simple" application infrastructures have a lot of moving parts. Managing all of this stuff effectively takes some effort, and configuration management tools such as Ansible can help.

Ansible is an automation engine that can help with provisioning infrastructure, configuring operating systems, deploying applications, and much more.

The goal of this lesson is to teach you how to get started using Ansible for automation. By then end of this lesson you should be able to create playbooks to automate basic tasks. You won't know everything there is to know about Ansible, however you'll know enough of the basics to start using Ansible. You'll understand how Ansible manages inventory, how to create simple modules, how to create playbooks, how to deal with errors and more.

Understanding a tool such as Ansible has a lot of value to developers and operations engineers. Especially since it's agentless, because that means you can start managing hosts without needing to install an agent on them first. Well, assuming Python is installed. Developers can use Ansible to automate the creation of development environments that mirror production. And operations can use the same playbooks to automate the creation of staging and production environments. This level of consistency between environments tends to reduce bugs; especially those caused from environmental differences.

One of the features of Ansible that makes it so appealing is that it allows you to create modules with whatever language you want. Another appealing feature is the YAML based playbooks. The reason this is so appealing is that YAML tends to be a very simple format for expressing tasks. And that makes it easier to get started using it.

What You'll Learn

Lecture	What you'll learn
Intro	What will be covered in this lesson
What is Ansible?	An introduction to Ansible
Concepts	An overview of the Ansible concepts
Installation	How to install Ansible
Inventory	How Ansible knows which servers to manage
Windows	How Ansible connects to Windows servers
Modules	What modules are and how to create one
Playbook	What playbooks are and how to create them
Handlers, Facts, Variables, and Templates	Handlers, Facts, Variables, and Templates
Roles	How to bundle functionality in a role
Errors and Debugging	How to deal with errors and how to use the debug module
Next Steps	How to keep learning

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