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

Module 3: Inventory

• Basic inventory example
• Hosts and groups

Module 4: Ansible Playbooks

• 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

Module 5 : Provisioners

• 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

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

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 our application
• How Ansible compares to alternatives such as Capistrano

Module 8: Docker containers with Ansible

• Brief intro to Docker
• The synergy of containerization and automation
• Using Ansible to build Docker containers
• MySQL containers
• Web application containers
• Data storage containers

Module 9: Testing and continuous integration

• Unit, integration and functional testing
• Automating your testing using GitHub and Travis CI

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