Programming and Application Security
Ansible
Agentless automation with playbooks and inventories.
- 9 notes
- 77 minutes of reading
- Ansible architecture and concepts: control node, inventory, modules and idempotencyWhat Ansible is and how it works: the agentless control node, inventories, modules, playbooks, plugins and collections, idempotency, and how network devices differ from servers. 8 min · Beginner
- Ansible inventories, groups and variablesHow to describe your network to Ansible: YAML and INI inventories, groups and nested groups, host_vars and group_vars folders, connection variables, variable precedence and dynamic inventories. 8 min · Beginner
- Ansible playbooks, tasks, handlers and conditionalsHow to write Ansible playbooks: plays and tasks, gathering and using facts, registering results, conditionals with when, loops, handlers, tags, check mode and error handling, with network and server examples. 9 min · Intermediate
- Ansible network modules and collections for Cisco, Arista and JuniperHow Ansible manages network devices: the cisco.ios, arista.eos and junipernetworks.junos collections, connection settings, facts, resource modules and their states, config and command modules, and saving changes. 9 min · Intermediate
- Templates with Jinja2 in AnsibleHow to generate device and server configurations from Jinja2 templates in Ansible: variables, loops, conditionals, filters, whitespace control, the template module and rendering configs for review before deployment. 8 min · Intermediate
- Ansible roles and collections: organising automationHow to structure growing Ansible projects with roles and collections: role directory layout, defaults versus vars, using roles in playbooks, dependencies, requirements.yml, Ansible Galaxy and a sensible project layout. 8 min · Intermediate
- Ansible Vault and handling secretsHow to keep passwords, keys and tokens out of plain text in Ansible: ansible-vault commands, encrypted files versus strings, vault IDs, supplying the vault password safely, no_log and external secret managers. 8 min · Intermediate
- Testing and running Ansible at scale: ansible-lint, Molecule and AWXHow teams make Ansible reliable and controlled: linting, syntax checks, Molecule role testing, check mode, CI pipelines, execution environments, and running jobs through AWX or Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. 10 min · Advanced
- Ansible and NetDevOps: playbooks, inventories and CI/CD for networksWhy Ansible suits network teams, inventories and variables, an idempotent VLAN playbook using Cisco IOS modules, check mode, protecting secrets, and how Git, reviews and CI/CD pipelines make network changes safer. 9 min · Advanced