Practical Ansible Solutions

If you are looking for a simple IT automation framework that's easy to manage, grow into, extend and adapt then Ansible is for you! Ansible is an Open Source, Python-based configuration management solution that saves you time and resources when automating deployment and management of application and IT infrastructure so you can spend your time doing other things.

In this video course, we'll focus on getting things done quickly, using real-world examples and a hands-on teaching style rather than focus too much on theory and conceptual ideas once the basics are covered so you can get the job done.

Core concepts—such as setting up the inventory and playbooks, ad-hoc commands and quick and dirty heavy lifting will get you up and running quickly. We'll then dive into proper playbook organization and using handlers, variables, conditionals and logic for maximizing the efficiency of your automation workflow. We'll also dive into handling growth and multi-role playbooks and stack orchestration.

As we move onward to victory we will dive into systems lifecycle management so you can handle users, software and packages, authentication, services and application/web content with ease as well as touch on Ansible Tower/AWX. We'll end the journey with consuming and using Ansible Galaxy so you can borrow, share and collaborate with the vibrant Ansible Open Source community and the plethora of community roles and playbooks available on the internet.

At the end of this course, you will attain a deeper understanding of Ansible usage and design and be empowered to create your own playbooks, properly growing and scaling them to adapt to the ever-changing needs of your IT landscape.

This course uses CentOS 7, and Ansible 2.3.1, while not the latest version available, it provides relevant and informative content for legacy users of CentOS, and Ansible.

About the Author

The primary course author, Will Foster, has been in the IT industry for the past two decades helping organizations build, automate and streamline platforms for business success. He is currently working as a Systems Engineer / DevOps professional in the realm of Performance and Scale Engineering. Will also leads and maintains several Open Source upstream projects and can be found at @sadsfae on Twitter.

Consulting on this course, Kambiz Aghaiepour has a storied career as a UNIX/Linux Systems and Network Engineer over the past three decades after graduating from the University of California Davis with a double-major in Computer Science and Mathematics. Kambiz currently works with Will as a Software Engineer / DevOps professional as well as contributing to several upstream Open Source projects.

About Firi DevOps
In their free time, Will Foster and Kambiz Aghaiepour serve as principal consultants for Firi DevOps, a lean, modern DevOps/IT consulting firm. Firi LLC offers DevOps consultation and IT solutions for businesses, startups, interesting projects and charitable causes.