Ansible for Cloud & DevOps Engineers¶
Duration: 6–8 weeks · Difficulty: Beginner → Advanced
Agentless automation with Ansible — inventories, idempotent playbooks, roles, Vault, collections, cloud and Kubernetes modules, CI/CD gates, AWX/AAP, and production troubleshooting.
Course status
Ready — 17 modules with create-file labs. Curriculum follows docs.ansible.com. Start with Introduction to Configuration Management and Ansible.
1. Course overview¶
Purpose¶
Automate infrastructure and applications declaratively — from first ansible ping through enterprise controllers, without agents on managed nodes.
Target roles¶
DevOps · Cloud · Platform · SRE · Linux Administrator · DevSecOps · Infrastructure Engineer
Prerequisites¶
- Linux fundamentals (SSH, packages, systemd)
- Git for playbook repositories
- YAML comfort (or equivalent shell/editor practice)
- Kubernetes before Module 13
- GitHub Actions or GitLab CI before Module 14
Learning arc¶
| Phase | Modules | Level |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | 1–4 | Beginner |
| Playbooks & data | 5–8 | Intermediate |
| Templates, collections & secrets | 9–11 | Intermediate |
| Cloud & platform | 12–15 | Advanced |
| Production & ops | 16–17 | Advanced |
Capstone outcomes¶
Multi-env repo layout · idempotent roles · Vault secrets · syntax-check in CI · kubernetes.core automation · AWX job templates · forks and fact caching · structured troubleshooting
2. Modules¶
| Module | Focus | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Configuration management | Introduction |
| 2 | Install & configuration | Installing Ansible |
| 3 | Inventory | Ansible inventory |
| 4 | Ad-hoc commands | Ad-hoc commands |
| 5 | Playbooks | Playbooks |
| 6 | Variables & facts | Variables and facts |
| 7 | Conditionals & loops | Conditionals and loops |
| 8 | Roles | Ansible roles |
| 9 | Templates | Jinja2 templates |
| 10 | Collections | Collections & Galaxy |
| 11 | Secrets | Vault and secrets |
| 12 | Cloud automation | Cloud automation |
| 13 | Kubernetes | Kubernetes automation |
| 14 | CI/CD | CI/CD integration |
| 15 | Automation Platform | AWX & AAP |
| 16 | Production | Production practices |
| 17 | Troubleshooting | Troubleshooting |