Course Introduction

About the course

The IT industry is moving forward in the automation journey. Machines execute operations faster than humans. Ansible is the technology that enables time-saving and helps avoid human errors by enabling infrastructure as code (IaC) in your data center.

This course teaches the foundations of the Ansible language and applies them in a Linux system administrator journey with real examples.

Intended audience

This course is designed mainly, but not exclusively, for:

• Automation DevOps
• Cloud engineers
• System administrators
• IT professionals

Prerequisites

Some of the prerequisites for taking this course are the following:

• Mandatory: Beginner Linux command line expertise is compulsory for learning Ansible.

• Preferred: Computer programming (preferably Python) and YAML syntax are advantageous but not necessary.

Course structure

This course is structured in lessons. Each lesson is specific for an Ansible functionality and has a lot of code examples and hands-on demos.

• Getting Started: This chapter discusses the Ansible architecture from the user’s point of view and teaches how to execute simple commands (Ansible ad hoc).

• Ansible Language: This chapter explores code and best practices. It includes:

  • Targeting remote hosts (Ansible inventory)
  • Writing automation recipes (Ansible playbook)
  • Writing code that adapts to different scenarios (Ansible variables)
  • Advantage of the Ansible internal values, facts, and magic variables
  • Executing the code only in some circumstances (conditions, loops, handlers)

• Ansible for Linux: This chapter explores some actual use cases for the Linux system administrator. It includes:

  • Testing network connectivity
  • Printing variables values
  • Configuration management (editing a single line or creating a new text file)
  • Executing commands on remote hosts

• Ansible Troubleshooting: This chapter explains reproducing some common errors, troubleshooting them, and fixing them in Ansible.