Automation with Ansible: Radically simplify IT Operations

IT operation tasks are typically quite versatile and thus often carried out manually. Typical system administrators’ tasks include creating virtual machines, configuring operation system or services, create and manage accounts for within manifold service landscapes and many more. All these tasks are carried out repeatedly and keep administrators from actually enhancing the IT environment they operate. In this course you’ll discover the power and flexibility of IT automation based on the free tool “Ansible”.

Ansible enables you to describe deployment processes quite easily and even more important it allows to describe the process so it becomes reusable for different services. Once described, a task modeled in Ansible it can be repeated within a fraction of time and less error-prone to individual mistakes.

The course will discuss the benefits and pitfalls and how Ansible can be used to simplify the daily work within IT operations. You’ll learn about opportunities and limitations of IT automation and a lot of practical input exemplarily implemented by means of Ansible.

We’ll start with the basic concepts of Ansible and quickly implement typical daily tasks such as creating user accounts, deploying and updating service configurations and end with the practice of maintaining various complex systems with extremely flexible modular automation scripts.

During the journey you will learn how to easily:

• Automate daily IT tasks;
• Minimize human errors;
• Modularize tasks so they can be reused by different systems;
• Integrate secrets to automation without giving up security;
• Configure Linux and even Windows systems;
• Deploy and configure network devices.

Requirements

• A laptop capable of running SSH;
• Basic Linux administration knowledge (as the examples and exercises are mainly based on Linux systems);
• Basic Windows administration is beneficial but not necessary;
• Basic Cisco administration is beneficial but not necessary;
• Basic Python knowledge is beneficial but not necessary.

Target audience

• System- and Network Administrators;
• Infrastructure Architects;
• DevOps Engineers;
• Everyone who is interested in practical input on IT operations automation.