Linux Automation with Ansible

Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

Session 1: INTRODUCTION TO ANSIBLE

• Ansible in steps
• An overview of Ansible

Session 2: DEPLOYING ANSIBLE

• Installing Ansible on Linux systems
• Authenticating Ansible with SSH
• Ansible configuration
• The Ansible inventory
• Ansible client configuration

Session 3: AD-HOC COMMANDS

• Generating an ad-hoc command
• Command line options
• Module documentation
• Using modules with ad-hoc commands
• Verifying Ansible syntax

Session 4: YAML

• What is YAML
• Common YAML syntax errors
• Writing YAML with vim
• Installing and configuring code editors

Session 5: PLAYBOOKS AND TASKS

• What is a playbook
• The playbook header
• Tasks
• Importing items
• Playbook best practices

Session 6: SIMPLE PLAYBOOKS

• Basic Ansible modules
• The file module
• The lineinfile module
• The copy module
• The archive module

Session 7: SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION PLAYBOOKS

• Playbook command line options
• Playbook tags
• System administration modules
• The service module
• The firewalld module
• The user module

Session 8: FURTHER ANSIBLE PLAYBOOKS

• Further Ansible modules
• Disk partitioning with Ansible
• Creating filesystems with Ansible
• The cron module
• Security related modules
• Managing SELinux with Ansible

Session 9: VARIABLES AND FACTS

• Simple variables
• List and Dictionary methods
• Variables within external files
• Command line variables
• Ansible prompts
• Registering variables
• Using module return values
• Ansible facts
• Commonly used Ansible facts
• Using facts within a task
• Using conditional statements with facts

Session 10: ROLES AND TEMPLATES

• Ansible roles
• The Ansible Galaxy command
• The role directory structure
• Constructing an Ansible role
• File templates
• The Ansible Galaxy repository
• Downloading and executing roles

Session 11: FURTHER CONFIGURATION

• Ansible Parallelism
• Fact caching
• Ansible Vault
• Creating and accessing the vault
• Encrypting variables
• Ansible client and server logging
• Error handling
• Ignoring failed commands
• Handlers and failures

Session 12: LOOPS AND SCRIPTING

• Ansible loops
• Looping through variables
• Number sequencing
• Random values
• Retries
• Ansible within shell scripts