Beginning Ansible

Course details

In this class, I am going to teach you how to use Ansible in your DevOps environment. This is a hands-on course in which you will learn how to build real world environments. Using Ansible, I will demonstrate deploying a LAMP stack, an Nginx

load balancer, and a Node.js server with Nginx used as a reverse proxy. We are going to use MySQL and Mongodb as our back-end databases.

Ansible belongs to the configuration management tool set. If you are Linux administrator, you've probably used shell scripts hundreds of times to perform repetitive tasks like deploying a web server, an application server and so on. That might've been fine for a couple of servers. But as this number's got larger, things have started to get complicated: now each bunch of servers needed a different configuration, the database servers are unlike the web servers, both types of which are nothing like the load-balancers. Sounds familiar? That's what the creator of Ansible thought, and that's why I chose it among other excellent configuration management tools to use in my line of work and teach it in this course.

Ansible is a Python library and it uses Python for its language. It communicates with the target machines through SSH, Linux admins will feel right at home. It does not need an agent, a central server, or a database. Just install it on your laptop, give it the hostnames of your machines and their classification and you're ready to go.

In this class, I assume you know nothing about DevOps or its tools. I introduce the subject, then start gradually exploring the amazing world of Ansible. You will know how to manage all types of Linux infrastructures, no matter how large or small they are using Ansible. The class is a project-based one, this means that we are going to build full application, with all its components and deploy it using Ansible.