Ultimate Ansible Bootcamp by School of Devops®

Unofficial Guide to EX407 Redhat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation

What you'll learn:

• What is ansible, why its needed and how it works
• How to configure ansible and setup static/dynamic inventories
• Ad hoc server management, running jobs in parallel
• Managing systems entities using ansible Modules
• Writing Playbooks to define the state of infrastructure as a code
• Creating modular, reusable code with Roles
• Creating dynmic code with vars and templates
• Using Ansible Galaxy
• Encrypting sensitive data with Vault
• Service Discovery and managing Multiple Environments
• Application Deployment Strategies, Rolling Updates

Ansible is set to be the standard in the world of IT Infrastrcuture Management. It's a rare combination of simplicity meeting sophistication. Its core principle being simple is reflected in all its design choices such as agentless setup, small footprint, push model, YAML as a language to define infrastructure state etc. Its easy to setup, easy to write code with, easy to extend while writing custom modules. At the same time it offers everything a IT Systems, Networks or a Oprations/Devops person needs. It allows you to do all of following by replacing array of dedicated tools.

• Whether you want to manage systems at scale
• run ad-hoc tasks on a group of servers
• automate systems and application configurations,
• do change management,
• deploy applications in a orchestrated way
• provision cloud servers or manage network or storage devices

This course is been created to help you master Ansible one step at a time. It starts with the fundamental concepts related to Infrastructure as Code, what ansible is, what is Idempotence, what makes Ansible stand apart. Then it helps you relate ansible to your project by taking up a use case. Once you setup the environment with the codespaces tool, you start diving in to the simple and sophisticated world of ansible one concept at a time. As part of this course you would,

• Setup an inventory of group of servers and configure ansible to manage those
• Write playbook for base systems configuration
• Create roles for automating web server provisioning and configurations
• Use galaxy roles to setup a load balancer
• Customise roles using group_vars to define your database and application configuraions
• Secure database passwords with ansible vault
• Deploy applications in rolling manner with zero downtime

By the end of this course you would have mastered ansible and should be able to use it to automate servers, applications and understand all the primitives that ansible offers.