Introduction

Welcome to the Ansible for the Absolute Beginners course! I’m Mumshad Mannambeth, your instructor and a seasoned DevOps trainer at KodeKloud.com with over 13 years of industry experience. Throughout my career, I’ve guided hundreds of thousands of students in mastering technology through interactive, hands-on learning.

In this course, you will learn Ansible by following a series of engaging lectures enhanced with animations and illustrations, which simplify complex concepts. We complement these lectures with demos to help you install and get started with Ansible, as well as browser-accessible hands-on labs. These labs are designed to run on any system without needing cloud platforms or high-end hardware since they use dedicated lab environments and challenges.

A Glimpse Into Our Labs

One of the first labs demonstrates a simple playbook that deploys configuration files using the template module:

- name: Deploy configuration files
  template:

Unlike environments where you only copy and paste commands, our labs are designed to be practical and exploratory. For example, instead of using a static configuration like:

ansible_host: 172.20.1

you’ll work in labs tailored for each lesson. You’ll be prompted to navigate directories, create configuration files, and modify host-specific variables. The following command sequence shows how you prepare your lab environment:

[thor@ansible-controller ~]$ cd playbooks/web-playbooks/
[thor@ansible-controller web-playbooks]$ mkdir host_vars
[thor@ansible-controller web-playbooks]$ vi host_vars/web1.yml

After completing these tasks, you might review configuration snippets similar to the one below, which defines a host:

ansible_host: 172.20.1.101
dns_server: 8.

Course Objectives

At the end of this course, you will deploy the KodeKloud e-commerce application using simple Ansible playbooks. This course is specifically designed for absolute beginners—no prior coding or scripting experience is needed.

We cover:

• A clear explanation of what Ansible is and its capabilities.
• Step-by-step instructions on setting up Ansible on your environment using a VirtualBox-deployed virtual machine.
• An introduction to YAML, the language used for writing Ansible playbooks.
• Interactive coding exercises that help you confidently automate tasks with Ansible.

To reinforce your learning, you can access hands-on labs and a browser-based quiz portal. The portal presents a range of questions and includes an editor for you to create and test your YAML files and playbooks. If you run into any challenges, hints and solutions are available, and our Q&A section is always open for support.

I'm excited to embark on this automation journey with you. Let’s get started!

Further Learning

• Explore the fundamentals of Ansible and other DevOps tools by visiting our detailed Ansible documentation.
• Learn more about best practices in automation and configuration management at KodeKloud.

Happy automating!