This year, get ready to equip your skill pack with excellent Ansible automation skills.

I’ve been following a lot of Ansible articles this year, and here are some things that everyone, whether new to Ansible or not, should learn.

It’s worth bookmarking these posts, or setting up a schedule task (or perhaps a Tower/AWX task) to remind yourself to keep reading.

If you’re new to Ansible, get started with these articles:

  • The Ansible Quick Start Guide has some useful information for beginners, as well as introduction to more advanced topics.
  • The 10 Ansible Modules You Need to Know and 5 Ansible Operations tasks articles have some of the most basic Ansible functionality that every Ansible administrator should be familiar with and study carefully.
  • How to Use Ansible Documenting Processes is an overview of some additional topics that I’m sure you’ll find interesting.

The remaining articles cover more advanced topics such as Windows administration, testing, hardware, clouds, and containers, and even include a case study on managing the needs of kids who are interested in technology.

I hope you enjoy Ansible as much as I did. Don’t stop learning!

  1. In a whimsical case study of how Ansible can Bring Peace to My Family, you can see how Ansible can quickly deploy a new notebook (or reinstall an old one) for your kids.
  2. Ansible for Windows Administrators by Taz Brown and Abner Malivert: Did you know that Ansible can manage Windows nodes as well? This article illustrates the basic Installation of Ansible server and Windows client using the deployment of an IIS as an example.
  3. 10 Ansible Modules You Need to Know by Shashank Hegde is a great article to learn about the most common, basic Ansible modules you should know. Running commands, installing packages, and action files are the basis for many useful automation tasks.
  4. How to Document processes with Ansible by Marco Bravo: Ansible YAML files are easy to read, so they can be used to document the manual steps needed to complete tasks. This feature helps you debug and extend, which makes life a lot easier. This article also includes guidance on Ansible-related topics such as testing and analysis.
  5. Clement Verna, Verifying server state with Testinfra and Ansible (translated) : Testing is an integral part of any CI/CD DevOps process. So why not include running results from testing Ansible as well? This introductory test architecture Testinfra article can help you check configuration results.
  6. Ansible Hardware Starting by Mark Phillips: The world is not entirely dominated by containers and virtual machines. Many system administrators still need to manage many hardware resources. With Ansible combined with a bit of PXE, DHCP, and other tricks, you can create a handy administrative framework that makes hardware easy to get up and running.
  7. What You Need to know about Ansible Modules by Jairo da Silva Junior: Modules bring great potential to Ansible, and there are already many modules available. But if you don’t have the modules you need, you can try to build one for yourself. Check out this article to see how you can build the modules you need from scratch.
  8. 5 Ansible Operations by Mark Phillips: This is another article on how to use Ansible to manage common system operations. This describes a series of examples of Tower (or AWX) that can replace command line operations.
  9. Chris Short’s Ansible Quick Start Guide is a downloadable PDF document. It can serve as a handy manual. The beginning of this article is helpful for beginners to get started. It also covers other areas of research, such as module testing, system administration tasks, and management of K8S objects.
  10. Ansible Reference Guide, CI/CD with Ansible Tower and GitHub, etc., by Mark Phillips: This is a monthly summary update, full of interesting links. Topics include Ansible basics, managing The E series of Netapp storage products, debugging, patching and other related topics. The article also includes some videos and links to some of the parties. Check out the details.

If you have some of your favorite Ansible articles, let us know in the comments.

Via: opensource.com/article/19/…

By James Farrell (lujun9972

This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China