[TalkPython] - Introduction to Ansible Course

Course Summary
A course by Matt Makai of Full Stack Python for software developers who want to learn the Ansible configuration management tool for managing servers, deploying web applications, and performing DevOps tasks.

Source code and course GitHub repository
github.com/fullstackpython/book-and-video-code-examples

What's this course about and how is it different?
Most books and courses only walk you through the narrow happy path through the difficult programming forest. When you step off the path you can feel lost and frustrated because the instructor is no longer there to keep you on track.

This course takes a different approach where I show you the mistakes and errors that you will commonly run into when using Ansible, such as:

• Handling Python 3 instead of 2 as a default remote server installation
• Identifying and fixing typos in command line arguments and file paths
• Tweaking configurations for services that need to start in certain orders
• Upgrading privileges when permissions are denied in running tasks
• Working with Ansible modules that have specific Python dependencies such as psycopg2 for PostgreSQL
• Fixing shell script commands running within Ansible tasks

The best way to learn a new software development library is to pair program with a more experienced developer. That's why most of this course is live coding with explanations of what we are doing and why along the way. View the full course outline for more details.

Learn Ansible by configuring servers and deploying applications
Ansible is a stable, widely-used open source configuration management tool that works amazingly well for application deployments in any programming language, not just Python web apps.

During this course we will build several Ansible playbooks together so we can learn the tool's core concepts including:

• Modules
• Tasks
• Roles
• Templates
• YAML syntax
• Variables
• Encryption

We'll build playbooks that demonstrate these concepts and connect them together by configuring servers and handling deployments.

Who is this course for?
The ideal student for this course is someone with the ability to create web applications (even simple ones) who wants to learn Ansible and configuration management to automate working with servers and application deployments.

If you don't know any programming at all, you'll want to take a primer first. I recommend you take the free MIT course Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python.

If you don't know Python, consider taking Michael's Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps course. You do not need to know Python to learn Ansible but a bit of knowledge will help understand some of the edge case issues we debug in this course.