Master Ansible

Agentless configuration management from absolute zero - inventory, playbooks, roles, Jinja2, Vault, rolling updates and CI - paired with 20 labs where real Ansible SSHes into four simulated managed hosts.

Modules

• What Ansible Is, and Why It Has No Agent - Configuration management from first principles: the problem it solves, why Ansible needs nothing installed on your servers, and how a single run actually reaches a machine.
• Inventory: Telling Ansible What Exists - Static inventories, groups and children, connection variables, patterns for selecting hosts, and the first taste of where variables live.
• Ad-Hoc Commands and Your First Playbook - One-off commands for investigation, then the YAML structure of a playbook, how it is parsed, and the most common syntax mistakes.
• Tasks, Modules and Doing Work Safely - Choosing the right module, controlling command and shell results with creates/changed_when/failed_when, and editing existing files without corrupting them.
• Variables, Facts and Who Wins - Where values come from, the precedence order that decides conflicts, facts gathered from the machine itself, and how to debug a value that is not what you expected.
• Conditionals and Loops - Running a task only when it applies, looping over lists and dictionaries, and the two mistakes that make a task silently do nothing.
• Handlers: Reacting to Change - Restarting services only when something actually changed, why notify silently does nothing when a name is mistyped, and how to control when handlers run.
• Roles: Packaging Automation for Reuse - The standard role layout Ansible loads by convention, how role variables interact with the outside world, and how roles are composed and ordered.
• Jinja2 Templates: Config Files That Think - Rendering configuration from variables, surviving undefined values, loops and conditionals inside templates, and validating before you replace a live file.
• Collections, Galaxy and Structuring Reuse - Where modules actually come from, installing and pinning third-party content, and choosing between import and include when composing task files.
• Idempotency and Honest Dry Runs - Why idempotency is an availability property, how check mode actually works, and the ways a playbook can quietly make --check a lie.
• Error Handling, Guardrails and Tags - block/rescue/always for deployments that fail safely, assertions that refuse a bad run before it starts, and tags for surgical partial runs.
• Secrets with Ansible Vault - Encrypting variables so they can live safely in Git, the vars/vault split that keeps files readable, vault IDs for multiple environments, and rotation.
• Rolling Updates, Delegation and Orchestration - Batched rollouts that keep a tier serving, doing work on a different host than the one being configured, and coordinating multi-tier changes.
• Operating Ansible: Inventory at Scale, Testing and CI - Dynamic inventory in production, ansible.cfg precedence, testing with lint and Molecule, and running Ansible from a pipeline rather than a laptop.