Gain insights into Ansible's core features like inventory, playbooks, and roles. Delve into writing playbooks, using Jinja2, and organize tasks for efficient, stable IT infrastructure management.

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Configuration management plays a pivotal role in maintaining a stable and organized IT infrastructure by enabling the systematic gathering of information from remote hosts, facilitating server provisioning, and streamlining application upgrades or deployments.

You will learn the core features of Ansible, such as inventory, variables, playbooks, roles, and handlers, which serve as the building blocks for configuration management. You will learn how to write playbooks that define and execute complex orchestration tasks with ease. Next, you’ll learn how to use roles to maintain consistency across configuration management projects and how to harness the power of Jinja2 to apply logic and control structures and generate configuration files dynamically.

After completing this course, you will be equipped with the necessary skills for customizing configurations, organizing automation tasks efficiently, and maintaining a desired state for your infrastructure.

Configuration Management Using Ansible

# Introduction to managed nodes

After successfully setting up a control node, we must confirm that the nodes we want to manage are prepared. Ansible allows us to be able to manage Linux-based as well as Windows-based nodes. Preparing a managed node will require some steps, depending on its underlying OS. 

# Setting up a managed node

Setting up an Ansible-managed node involves a series of steps, including the initial provisioning and setting up of the node and configuring the connection between the managed and the control node.

## Provisioning and setting up a node

Just like in provisioning a control node, we also need to decide the type of machine while provisioning a managed node. It's important to note that we're not constrained by only using a Linux-based OS because Ansible also supports Windows-based systems.

We can explore either of the following methods:

- Provisioning a virtual machine on a cloud provider platform (GCP, AWS, Azure, Digital Ocean, or OpenStack).

- Creating a virtual machine in our local environment.

- Using infrastructure as code tools like Terraform to spin up a machine for our use.

- Creating a container instance.

## Configuring a connection

After our managed node is up and running, we need to ensure that its connection is set up. We can achieve this using different methods depending on the operating system of the managed node.

### Configuring a connection for Linux-based nodes

To ensure connection to our Linux-based managed node, we can leverage SSH by following the steps below:

1. We switch to the control node and get the public key of the target node using the following command:
   ```
   ssh-keyscan -t rsa <ip_of_managed_node>
   ```

Get familiar with how to configure an Ansible managed node.

Getting Started

What Is Configuration Management?

Basics of Ansible

Major Concepts in Ansible

Ansible Variables and Other Elements

Manage Configuration with Ansible

Wrap Up

Deploy a Web Application Using Ansible

Ansible Managed Nodes

Introduction to managed nodes

Setting up a managed node

Provisioning and setting up a node