Why configuration management is a critical part of any DevOps team

Strengths and weaknesses of Ansible

Webscale

How Ansible is different from other CM tools like Chef and Puppet

Getting started with Ansible terminology

Ansible and YML for describing your environments

Some prerequisites

Getting set up on a Mac

Getting set up on Linux

Getting set up on Windows

Testing with Vagrant

Using SSH keys to connect to your target nodes

Hands-on

Basic inventory example

Hosts and groups

Hands-on

A useful directory structure to keep your Ansible code organized

Using git to manage your Ansible code

A first look at a playbook to install and configure NTP time synchronization

Hands-on

Connecting Ansible to your preferred cloud provider (we’ll use DigitalOcean)

Creating a new server instance

Dynamic inventory

Dynamic inventory on Amazon AWS

Mixing static and dynamic inventory

Hands-on

Deploying our app from SCM to our local Vagrant environment

How we would deploy that code to production once tested by QA

Updating our application

How Ansible compares to alternatives such as Capistrano

Hands-on

A brief intro to Docker

The synergy of containerization and automation

Using Ansible to build Docker containers

MySQL containers

Web application containers

Data storage containers

Hands-on

Unit, integration, and functional testing

Automating your testing using GitHub and Travis CI

Hands-on

Real-world use case: Using Ansible to automate CM and application pipelines through continuous integration, release, deployment, and operations

We’ll review your own environments and processes and evaluate how to best integrate Ansible’s configuration management for your own needs

Hands-on