Configuration Management with Ansible

Course Details

A 2-day course, 6 hours per day (12 hours in total), delivered as lectures with hands-on labs against several machines at once. Intermediate level. Learners take home a lab guide, complete playbook and role samples, and a new-server setup checklist. Ansible is open source and can be used in the organization at no licensing cost.

Day 1: Ansible Fundamentals and Playbooks

Section 1: Configuration Management Concepts

• The problems with manual configuration: slow, inconsistent and unauditable
• How Ansible works: agentless over SSH and the declarative model
• Ansible versus provisioning tools such as Terraform, and using them together
• The idempotency principle: repeated runs produce the same result

Section 2: Installation and Inventory Management

• Installing Ansible on the control node and preparing SSH keys to the targets
• Writing file-based inventory, grouping hosts and setting group and host variables
• Verifying connectivity and troubleshooting failed connections
• Lab: set up the control node and connect to several target machines

Section 3: Ad-hoc Commands

• Running one command across many machines without writing a playbook
• Using basic modules ad-hoc: ping, command, shell and copy
• Targeting hosts with patterns and limiting concurrency
• Lab: check status and gather information from all machines with ad-hoc commands

Section 4: Writing Playbooks

• Playbook structure: plays, tasks, handlers and readable naming
• Using become for privilege escalation and setting the connection user
• Dry runs with check mode and reviewing changes with diff
• Lab: write a playbook that installs and configures a web server on all targets

Section 5: Modules for Real Work

• Managing packages, services, users and groups with standard modules
• Managing files, directories, permissions and copying files to targets
• Using conditionals (when), loops and error handling
• Lab: write a playbook that prepares a new machine against the organization checklist

Day 2: Templates, Roles and Production Use

Section 6: Variables, Facts and Templates

• Variable precedence and where to define variables
• Using facts gathered from target machines to drive decisions
• Generating configuration files with Jinja2 templates tailored per machine
• Lab: generate a configuration file from a template that adapts to each host

Section 7: Roles and Code Organization

• Standard role structure: tasks, handlers, templates, files, vars and defaults
• Refactoring long playbooks into reusable roles
• Using roles from Ansible Galaxy and assessing their trustworthiness first
• Lab: convert your playbook into a role and reuse it

Section 8: Managing Multiple Environments

• Separating inventory and variables across dev, staging and production
• Using group_vars and host_vars for environment-specific values
• Rolling updates so services do not all restart at once
• Lab: run the same playbook against two environments with different settings

Section 9: Security and Ansible Vault

• Storing passwords and keys safely with Ansible Vault and encrypting variable files
• Least-privilege permissions for the account that runs Ansible
• Practices for keeping Ansible code in Git without leaking secrets
• Lab: encrypt a secrets file with Vault and consume it from a playbook

Section 10: Production Use and Maintenance

• Writing genuinely idempotent playbooks and testing before touching production
• Structuring an Ansible project so a team can work on it together
• Running Ansible from CI/CD and keeping run logs
• Using Ansible with Terraform: provision the machine then configure it immediately

Section 11: Capstone and Next Steps

• Capstone: write a playbook set that prepares a new server completely for service
• Present your role structure and the reasoning behind the design
• A first-30-days plan for adopting Ansible in your organization
• Workshop: present your playbooks and review the code together