10 Best Ansible Tutorials For Beginners in 2024
Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. Avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications— automate in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems.
In other words, it is an IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.
Ansible is currently one of the most popular IT automation software on the market and makes it easy to not only set up, configure and deploy your systems, but also code them for specification and even design a complete network from scratch.
To make the best use of this platform, you have to find the best Ansible guide for beginners. Luckily, we have curated some of the Best Ansible online courses and tutorials for beginners for the best way to learn Ansible in 2021.
Although Ansible helps you become faster in your work as it makes your applications and systems easier to deploy, it is just the beginning of what you need to learn to excel as a professional in 2021 as there are a lot more Ansible topics you will learn:
Ansible Topics to learn:
- Package Management
- Service Module
- Copy Module
- Debug
- Lineinfile
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Top Ansible Courses List
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Mastering Ansible: Learn Configuration Management and Orchestration
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Mastering Ansible: Scalable Orchestration, DeVos, and Automation
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Ansible for the Beginners course for DevOps Engineers & System Admins
1. Ansible Tutorial for the Absolute Beginner: DevOps
This course introduces Ansible to beginners in DevOps. Here, you will learn to practice Ansible with coding exercises in the browser. The course introduces basic use cases of Ansible followed by an introduction to Ansible Inventory, Playbooks, Modules, Variables, Conditionals, Loops, and Roles.
Course rating: 4.6 out of 5.0 (15,765 Ratings total)
Duration: 2.5 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will:
- learn Ansible step by step.
- understand the beginner-level fundamentals of Ansible.
- understand YAML with the help of hands-on exercises.
- build Ansible inventory files with hands-on exercises.
- automate provisioning and web server deployment.
You can take Ansible Tutorial for the Absolute Beginner: DevOps Certificate Course on Udemy.
2. Learning Ansible
This course explains what the Ansible system is, and how to install Ansible on a Linux operating system so you can start experimenting with it. Further, this course goes into the different components in an Ansible system, covering concepts such as how to work with hosts and variables and control task and play behavior.
Course rating: 41,969 total enrollments
Duration: 1 Hour
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn about:
- what is Ansible?
- working with hosts and variables.
- IT Automation.
- controlling task and play behavior.
- coordinating complicated sets of actions.
- managing system configurations.
- reacting to configuration changes.
- repeating a task across a fleet.
- managing extensions in Ansible.
After covering these concepts, the course goes over the fundamental concepts of Ansible and teaches you the best way to learn Ansible by sharing some of the high-level use cases that it was designed to tackle.
You can take the Learning Ansible Certificate Course on LinkedIn.
3. Mastering Ansible: Learn Configuration Management and Orchestration
The course is designed as a journey through configuring a realistic application stack from the ground up. In addition to the core concepts of configuration with Ansible, you will learn about building tools that will help in maintaining and troubleshooting your application. The goal is to have a workflow where all of the configuration and troubleshooting is done through ansible playbooks that can be committed to a repository and improved over time.
Course rating: 4.3 out of 5.0 (6,768 Ratings total)
Duration: 5 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- execute ad-hoc commands against servers using Ansible.
- write Ansible configuration playbooks to deploy a 3-tier web application.
- configure Ansible roles with tasks, handlers, files, templates, and default variables.
- write operational playbooks to check cluster status and perform a cluster restart.
- optimize Ansible playbooks to reduce playbook execution time.
- test and troubleshoot Ansible playbook execution.
With this tutorial, you will learn Ansible step by step. Starting, you will build up a sample application environment layer-by-layer, learning a new concept in each lecture.
After the application is up and running, you refactor towards the setup in section 4 with an emphasis on modularity and encapsulation. Plus, you optimize your code and learn about techniques to reduce the playbook execution time. The course finishes with a final section on troubleshooting and testing.
You can take Mastering Ansible: Learn Configuration Management and Orchestration Certificate Course on Udemy.
4. Ansible Tutorial - Getting Started with Ansible Software
The course has been designed as a step-by-step tutorial to help you learn Ansible for configuring and managing your IT systems and servers. Here, you will learn exactly how to use an automation tool for simplifying your life and your job.
Course rating: 4.5 out of 5.0 (645 Ratings total)
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- automate your IT infrastructure tasks.
- perform continuous delivery and deployment using Ansible.
- manage and configure your infrastructure optimally.
- use the labs and real-world examples present in this course.
The course includes:
- An introduction to automation tools, including the difference between Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc.
- Setting up the Ansible environment and configuring it.
- Ansible basics and fundamental concepts.
- How to use Ansible basic commands.
- How to set up and deploy Ansible with your server.
You can take Ansible Tutorial - Getting Started with Ansible Software Certificate Course on Eduonix.
5. Ansible for Network Engineers: Quick Start GNS3 & Ansible
In this course, you will learn how you can use Ansible for troubleshooting networks after that, how to use a single Ansible command to retrieve mac address table information from multiple switches in seconds. Then pipe the output to a regular expression to filter down to a single MAC address.
Course rating: 4.5 out of 5.0 (2,278 Ratings total)
Duration: 5 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- automate network configurations with Ansible.
- troubleshoot networks using Ansible.
- leverage the power of DevOps (Ansible).
- understand Network Automation with GNS3 and Ansible.
This course will teach you how to learn Ansible to programmatically configure Cisco network devices. You will also learn how to build up your foundations so you can start with more Ansible topics to learn.
Lastly, you will learn how to automate networks using SSH, Ansible Network modules, Ansible Playbooks, and Ansible ad hoc commands.
You can take Ansible for Network Engineers: Quick Start GNS3 & Ansible Certificate Course on Udemy.
6. Ansible Essential Training
This course introduces intermediate to advanced use cases for using the tool at scale. The course shows you how to reuse Ansible functionality with roles, encrypt secret data with Ansible Vault, support idempotence, and manage multiple groups of systems with Ansible Tower.
Course rating: 23,333 total enrollments
Duration: 3.2 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn about:
- IT Automation.
- task execution management.
- looping tasks.
- looping in templates.
- reusing code with roles.
- encrypting data.
- network management.
- creating idempotent plays.
- system infrastructure management.
It also shows you how to string these concepts together to use Ansible in the most efficient way possible: variablizing resources, capturing your ideas into roles, and extending Ansible from simple server management to network management and beyond.
You can take the Ansible Essential Training Certificate Course on LinkedIn.
7. Mastering Ansible: Scalable Orchestration, DeVos, and Automation
The course starts with an introduction to Ansible's architecture and how to provide effective scalable automation. Then it moves on to the process of installing and configuring it with various platforms. Further, you will look into Ansible modules and playbooks with YAML syntax and learn how to execute it.
Course rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 (1,396 Ratings total)
Duration: 11 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- install and configure Ansible on all major platforms (Mac, Windows, and Linux).
- understand more about Ansible modules, the structure of Ansible playbooks, the creation and execution of Ansible playbooks, Ansible Facts, and Jinja2 templating.
- understand ansible-playbook advanced topics: using built-in modules, dynamic inventories, parallel looping, conditional execution, task delegation, magic variables, registering results, Ansible vault, creating modules, and creating plugins.
- perform structuring Ansible playbooks: includes, roles, tags.
- use Ansible with cloud services and containers, AWS, and Docker.
- perform troubleshooting with Ansible.
- use Ansible for validation and testing.
Next, you will get to know about advanced Ansible playbooks, and even structure them. You will learn to use Ansible with cloud services and containers and provision it with AWS and Docker. Finally, you will master troubleshooting, validating, and testing with Ansible.
You can take Mastering Ansible: Scalable Orchestration, DeVos, and Automation Certificate Course on Udemy.
8. Ansible for the Beginners course for DevOps Engineers & System Admins
The course helps you to understand how Ansible works and automate your day-to-day activities. It also discusses some of the topics like ad-hoc commands, playbooks, variables, inventory, roles with detailed examples.
Course rating: 4.4 out of 5.0 (113 Ratings total)
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will:
- learn Ansible from scratch
- write ansible playbooks.
- write ansible roles.
- infrastructure automation.
- automate your regular tasks using Ansible
You can take Ansible for the Beginners course for DevOps Engineers & System Admins Certificate Course on Eduonix.
9. Learning Path: Automation with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt
This course covers the why and how of Ansible, Puppet, and Salt, in a step-by-step manner. Initially, you will focus on Ansible and learn how to manage environments and implement strategies in Ansible and be introduced to Ansible Galaxy and Tower, which are Ansible's enterprise tooling for supporting large-scale infrastructure. Then you will move on to learning Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations.
Course rating: 4.2 out of 5.0 (899 Ratings total)
Duration: 14 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- configure and manage your infrastructure using Ansible Playbooks.
- create task blocks and choose the right Ansible Strategy for the job.
- understand the nuances of Ansible 2 and its new features.
- write efficient, reusable, and modularized Puppet code.
- write extensive tests for the code and run automated builds using Jenkins Integration.
- create a pipeline for effective code management.
- understand Salt’s state system and write and manage complex states.
- use and react to real-time events across an infrastructure.
Using Puppet you can control each Puppet agent in a network. You will learn how to do so by first understanding the Puppet ecosystem and then detailed topics such as configuration and management of Puppet servers, environments, module repositories, and reusable modules. With Salt too, you will use a similar approach. You will start from the basics, such as installing, configuring, deploying, and managing a web application to advanced concepts like Docker containers across multiple systems behind an HAProxy load balancer.
You can take Learning Path: Automation with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt Certificate Course on Udemy.
10. Getting Started with Ansible
In this course, Getting Started with Ansible, you will learn foundational knowledge to quickly and reliably configure just about anything with Ansible. First, you will learn how to install Ansible and use the ansible Ad-hoc command-line tool to execute one-off modules in Ansible to configure single aspects of a system like ensuring a line exists in a file, or an application is installed.
Course rating: 3.5 out of 5.0 (81 Ratings total)
Duration: 4.8 Hours
Certificate: Certificate of completion
In this course, you will learn how to:
- install Ansible and use the ansible Ad-hoc command-line tool to execute one-off modules o configure single aspects of a system.
- manually configure applications, servers, and networks.
- swap out Ansible's default usage of SSH via connection plugins to connect to different environments such as Windows machines and docker containers.
Later, you will see how to swap out Ansible's default usage of SSH via connection plugins to connect to different environments such as Windows machines and docker containers. And how the ansible-pull command inverts Ansible's default push model. Finally, you will discover reuse with Ansible Galaxy and corresponding ansible-galaxy command via both Roles and Collections.
You can take Getting Started with Ansible Certificate Course on Pluralsight.
Thank you for reading this. We hope our course curation would help you to pick the right course to learn Ansible from scratch. In case you want to explore more, you can take the free Ansible courses.
Hey! If you have made it this far then certainly you are willing to learn more and here at Coursesity, it is our duty to enlighten people with knowledge on topics they are willing to learn. Here are some more topics that we think will be interesting for you!