Learn Ansible from the basics to advanced topics — perfect for SysAdmins, DevOps, and Cloud Engineers.
Before diving deeper into Ansible, you need to prepare a few basic skills and tools, ranging from Linux CLI, SSH, YAML, to environment setup and installing Ansible itself.

In this episode we will trace the evolution of infrastructure automation, the history of Ansible's birth, and understand why the agentless approach it brings has become the top choice in the modern era.

In this episode we will dissect how Ansible works behind the scenes, from the Control Node and Managed Nodes architecture, the module execution flow over SSH, to key components such as Inventory, Playbook, and ansible.cfg.

Managing the list of servers managed by Ansible through static and dynamic inventory, from INI/YAML formats, host grouping, host variables, to host patterns for targeting servers precisely.

Using Ansible ad-hoc commands for daily operational tasks: checking uptime, managing files and packages, restarting services, and pushing SSH keys to many servers with just a single command line.

Writing your first Ansible playbook for installing and configuring NGINX, understanding play structure, privilege escalation, important CLI flags, and the idempotency mechanism behind the OK, CHANGED, and FAILED statuses.

Learn the Handler concept in Ansible, why a service should only restart when its configuration changes, the difference between regular tasks and handlers, and their rules and limitations such as flush_handlers and multiple notification.

Learn variable management in Ansible from how to create them, the precedence hierarchy, group_vars and host_vars best practices, to leveraging ansible facts to build dynamic and efficient playbooks.

Learn how to create dynamic configuration files using the Jinja2 templating engine, from basic expression and statement syntax, the ansible.builtin.template module, to using filters to manipulate data inside templates.

Learn logic branching with when, modern looping with loop, and retry loops with until so your Ansible playbooks are adaptive to the diverse server conditions of the real world.
