Fundamentals of Ansible: Deep Dive
In a world where automation is king, when it comes to configuration management, Ansible rules. Ansible, an opensource project from RedHat allows you to automate configuration including installing software, applying security patches, managing networks across the whole spectrum—be that locally, onprem, in the cloud.
In this exercise driven session, we’ll learn Ansible from the ground up. We’ll see how to declare your inventory, use modules to run arbitrary tasks on hosts, collect related tasks into playbooks, make reusable units of work using roles, and how to use variables. By the end of this session, you will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of how Ansible works, and how you can start to use it to automate away the mundane.
Detailed agenda:
Why Ansible?
How does Ansible work?
Ansible characteristics
Run ansible for the first time
Run an ansible module with args
Escalating privileges
Keeping track of your inventory
Groups of groups (of groups?)
Variables, specifically inventory variables
Extracting group and host variables into group/host variable files
Plays and playbooks
Our first play
Environment specific variables
Making a useful playbook
Jinja2 string interpolation
Roles
Using ansible.builtin.copy and ansible.builtin.template in roles
Using handlers
Using Ansible facts and filters
Using Ansible datastructures
Using tags
Encrypting passwords using ansiblevault
Checking your scripts
Benefits of Ansible
Tradeoffs
About Raju Gandhi
Raju is a software craftsman with almost 20 years of hands-on experience scoping, architecting, designing, implementing full stack applications.
He provides a 360 view of the development cycle, is proficient in a variety of programming languages and paradigms, experienced with software development methodologies, as well an expert in infrastructure and tooling.
He has long been in the pursuit of hermeticism across the development stack by championing immutability during development (with languages like Clojure), deployment (leveraging tools like Docker and Kubernetes), and provisioning and configuration via code (toolkits like Ansible, Terraform, Packer, everything-as-code).
Raju is a published author, internationally known public speaker and trainer.
Raju can be found on Twitter as @looselytyped.
In his spare time, you will find Raju reading, playing with technology, or spending time with his wonderful (and significantly better) other half.