Course
Ansible: Automation Without Agents
Configuration management done right — inventories, playbooks, roles, idempotency, vault secrets, and the conventions that keep a 200-playbook codebase navigable.
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Core Mechanics
The agentless model, inventories, and the idempotency contract — what Ansible is actually doing when you press enter.
- 01The Agentless Model: SSH, Python, and No DaemonsWhy Ansible pushes Python over SSH instead of running agents, what that buys you operationally, and the failure modes it quietly avoids — plus the ones it doesn't.20mOpen
- 02Inventories: Groups, Variables, and Dynamic SourcesStatic INI and YAML inventories, group_vars/host_vars layering, host patterns, and dynamic inventory plugins — where your fleet's truth actually lives.22mOpen
- 03Playbooks and the Idempotency ContractWhat a play actually is, why modules beat shell commands, and how changed/ok/failed tell you whether your automation is honest.24mOpen
Playbooks in Anger
Variables, facts, loops, handlers, templates, and secrets — the machinery inside real playbooks.
- 01Variables, Facts, and the 22-Level Precedence MazeWhere variables can live, why 'host_vars beats group_vars' is only the start, how gathered facts work, and the precedence rules that explain every 'where did that value come from' bug.24mOpen
- 02Loops, Handlers, and Conditionals Without the Trapsloop vs the deprecated with_* forms, when clauses that actually evaluate the way you think, and the handler lifecycle that decides whether your service reload happens.22mOpen
- 03Jinja2 Templates and Vault Secretstemplate vs copy vs lineinfile, the Jinja2 idioms that show up in every config file, and how vault encryption keeps secrets in git without leaking them.24mOpen
Keeping It Maintainable
Roles, collections, failure handling, speed, and the project conventions that scale past a hundred playbooks.
- 01Roles and Collections: The Units of ReuseThe role directory contract, defaults vs vars, dependencies and meta, and how collections package content — plus when a role earns its own repo.22mOpen
- 02Failure Handling, Execution Strategies, and Speedblock/rescue/always, failed_when, serial and strategies, async/poll — and the tuning knobs (forks, pipelining, fact caching) that turn a 40-minute run into a 6-minute one.26mOpen
- 03The 200-Playbook Codebase: Layout, Testing, and ConventionsThe repo structure, ansible.cfg, tagging, testing with Molecule, linting, and the naming conventions that decide whether your Ansible ages into infrastructure or into archaeology.24mOpen