Course Link: Mastering Ansible
- Execute ad-hoc commands against servers using Ansible
- Write Ansible configuration playbooks to deploy a 3-tier web application
- Configure Ansible roles with tasks, handlers, files, templates, and default variables
- Write operational playbooks to check cluster status and perform a cluster restart.
- Optimize Ansible playbooks to reduce playbook execution time.
- Test and troubleshoot Ansible playbook execution.
- You should have a Linux or Mac OS X computer, or access to at lease one Linux virtual machine for installing Ansible.
- You’ll need a code editor or IDE of your choice.
- You’ll need a terminal and ssh client for running Ansible against target hosts.
- You should have access to 5 Linux servers (bare-metal or virtual machine) if you want to setup the course environment and follow along step-by-step.
The course is divided into 6 sections, starting with initial installation and foundational concepts. Starting in section 3, we build up a sample application environment layer-by-layer, learning a new concept in each lecture. After the application is up and running, we refactor our setup in section 4 with an emphasis on modularity and encapsulation. In section 5, we optimize our code and learn about techniques to reduce the playbook execution time. The course finishes with a final section on troubleshooting and testing.
For each lecture, we introduce a new Ansible concept and apply it to our playbooks. For most lectures, we execute the new concept in the demo environment so you can see what the output should look like. In the notes of each lecture, you’ll find a link to the relevant documentation pages, along with a snapshot of the codebase at the end of that lecture.
This course was built with Ansible version 1.9.3, applied to a 3-tiered web application environment leveraging NGINX, Apache2, Python, and MySQL on Ubuntu Linux servers. We do not cover administering Windows servers in this course.
This course is designed as an introduction to Ansible, but also as a guide for engineers interested in configuration management, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and devops principles.
- The course is designed for students who have little or no experience with Ansible, but are familiar with Linux systems administration concepts.
- No programming or previous automation experience is required.
- If you’ve never logged into a Linux shell and run commands before, you will learn the Ansible syntax but you may not understand the ‘why’ behind the tasks that we configure. We try to explain all systems concept that we cover, but we aren’t starting from the beginning with Linux in this course.
