Learning Ansible — The quick way

Are you strapped for time but wanting to learn Ansible? I’ve got your back! I’ve been using Ansible for several years now, and was first introduced to it as a replacement to Puppet. It didn’t take me long to learn, but it what really amazed me what how much more it could do!

I’ve used Ansible to generate Cloudformation templates, perform Websphere deployments, collect information on multiple hosts and do simple configuration management for hosts as well as testing software.

Some of my favourite things about Ansible are how easy it is to get started, the ability to set and override variables in multiple locations, templating, looping and the simple use of tags to target subsets of tasks.

Looping, templates and variables in Ansible:

Ansible does a great job of system level tasks that you’d normally perform in the shell or by scripts (think file manipulation, installing software, restarting services) but it can also communicate with multiple hosts, and has modules for Cloud providers too. It’s simplicity is where it really shines.

Head over to https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jIsDHf-5M1w_KWAyU_R5Uv-iHwvRntUb4cC3yBW3_ME/ to learn more about some of my favourite Ansible constructs and how you can use and how you can use Ansible to automate some of your daily tasks.

Ansible Links

• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/index.html — Ansible Documentation
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules_by_category.html — Module categories
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/list_of_all_modules.html — All Ansible Modules
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/YAMLSyntax.html — YAML Syntax … read this a few times, it’ll come in handy
• http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/playbooks.html — Ansible Playbooks
• https://zaiste.net/posts/ansible_101/ — A nice 5 minute hands-on intro to Ansible
• https://gist.github.com/andreicristianpetcu/b892338de279af9dac067891579cad7d — Ansible cheatsheet, a great reference point for just about any bit of Ansible code you’d need to write
• https://www.ansible.com/blog/ansible-best-practices-essentials — Best practices
• https://serversforhackers.com/c/an-ansible2-tutorial — Detailed Ansible tutorial with explaination and code.
• https://gist.github.com/phred/2897937 — pedantically commented playbook

Originally posted on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-ansible-quick-way-andrew-khoury/

Bonus Points:

If you liked learning about Ansible I have a git repo full of DevOpsy learnings https://github.com/drewkhoury/devops-101