Ansible Configuration Management Boot Camp

Course Code: 1776

$1950

Overview
Schedule classes
What you'll learn
Outline
Prerequisites
Who should attend

Overview

The Ansible Configuration Management Boot Camp discusses the flexibility and power of the Ansible configuration management system. It demonstrates how to use this system to build and scale highly reliable infrastructure for different environments and projects. The course discusses real-world examples to explain how Ansible can be used to manage environments as small as a couple of servers to massively distributed global infrastructure, by using a simple syntax. The course enables participants to have a thorough understanding and intensive hands-on experience of building reliable and easily reproducible infrastructure using Ansible, and teaches how to integrate Ansible into the operations workflow.

Schedule Classes

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Course Delivery

This course is available in the following formats:

Live Classroom
Duration: 3 days

Live Virtual Classroom
Duration: 3 days

What You'll learn

Configuration management and DevOps
Ansible terminology
Setting up Ansible
Ansible playbooks
Docker containers
Different types of testing
Inventory

Outline

Module 1: Introduction

Why configuration management is a critical part of any DevOps team?
Strengths and weaknesses of Ansible
Web scale
- How Ansible is different from other CM tools like Chef and Puppet
- Getting started with Ansible terminology
- Ansible and YML for describing your environments

Module 2: Getting set up

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
Lab: Install Ansible and test connectivity to the test nodes

Module 3: Inventory

Basic inventory example
Hosts and groups
Lab: Create an inventory file that defines four hosts, two web servers and two database servers, and assign these hosts to groups that describe their function

Module 4: Ansible Playbooks

A useful directory structure to keep your Ansible code organized
Using Git to manage Ansible code
A first look at a playbook to install and configure NTP time synchronization
Lab: Create a playbook to install and configure openssh-server on all nodes and ensure it is running

Module 5: Provisioners

Connecting Ansible to the preferred cloud provider (the course uses DigitalOcean)
Creating a new server instance
Dynamic inventory
Dynamic inventory on Amazon AWS
Mixing static and dynamic inventory
Lab: Refactor your inventory so that your staging environment is local using Vagrant, and your production environment is built on DigitalOcean.

Module 6: Highly available infrastructure with Ansible

Spec up our inventory and host groups
Using roles
Configure our database backend
Configure our web server front-end
Configure a replicated filesystem
Configure centralized logging
Lab: Build the sample infrastructure on your local Vagrant environment

Module 7: Application deployments with Ansible

Deploying our app from SCM to our local Vagrant environment
How we would deploy that code to production once tested by QA
Updating the application
How Ansible compares to alternatives such as Capistrano
Lab: Proceed with deploying our application on your local Vagrant environment

Module 8: Docker containers with Ansible

Brief introduction to Docker
The synergy of containerization and automation
Using Ansible to build Docker containers
MySQL containers
Web application containers
Data storage containers
Lab: Adapt your infrastructure to deploy our sample app using Docker

Module 9: Testing and continuous integration

Unit, integration and functional testing
Automating your testing using GitHub and Travis CI
Lab: Create some tests for our SSH Playbook to make sure there are no syntax errors and that Ansible is configuring nodes as expected

Module 10: Preparing for Ansible back at work

Real-world use case: Using Ansible to automate CM and application pipelines through continuous integration, release deployment and operation
Reviewing environments and processes, and evaluate how to best integrate Ansible’s configuration management for your own needs
Exercise: Your to-do list

Prerequisites

There are no mandatory prerequisites for this course. It is recommended for participants to complete the Fundamentals of DevOps before taking this course.