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

Congratulations! You've completed the “Configuration Management Using Ansible” course. Give yourself a round of applause!

# Final words
This course highlighted Ansible's role as a configuration management tool for our infrastructure. Being idempotent, Ansible ensures consistent states without unnecessary changes, ensuring reliability during configuration deployments.

We learned about fundamental configuration management concepts, emphasizing Ansible's role. Additionally, we discussed how to write Ansible tasks and playbooks. We also explored inventories and learned how to work with Ansible modules.

We also learned important concepts, such as:

- **Control and managed nodes:** Control nodes are systems where Ansible is installed and run, while managed nodes are systems that are configured and orchestrated by Ansible.
- **Inventory:** This is a list of managed nodes—specified in a configuration file—that Ansible can connect to that provides details such as IP addresses and hostnames.
- **Modules:** These are Ansible’s units of work. They execute tasks, each representing a specific functionality on managed nodes.
- **Tasks:** These are the individual units of work in Ansible playbooks, representing actions to be performed on the managed nodes.
- **Playbooks:** These are Ansible configuration files written in YAML format, defining a set of tasks and plays to be executed on managed nodes.
- **Handlers:** These are special tasks in Ansible playbooks that are only executed if notified by other tasks, typically used for actions like restarting a service after a configuration change.
- **Roles:** These are a way of organizing and reusing Ansible playbooks that contain tasks, handlers, variables, and other related files in a structured directory.
- **Variables:** These are used to store values that can be referenced and reused in playbooks, providing a way to make them more flexible and dynamic.
- **Jinja2 template:** These are used in Ansible to create dynamic content by embedding variables and expressions within a file, allowing for more flexible configurations.
- **Loops and conditionals:** These provide the control flow, allowing tasks to be repeated or conditionally executed based on certain criteria, enhancing the flexibility and adaptability of playbooks.

This course also included a hands-on project that encouraged learners to embark on their configuration management projects using Ansible. Learners can now go one step forward and cultivate the habit of always automating their real-world infrastructure configuration needs.

# Next steps

To improve on the knowledge learned in this course, you should consider picking up an infrastructure project and breaking it down into tasks, playbooks, and roles accordingly. You can also consider joining online forums, where the knowledge of Ansible is discussed to gain more real-world experience. Moreover, it's important to continue learning and picking up advanced topics about infrastructure automation and configuration management.

# Feedback

We hope that this course served its purpose well and met your expectations. We would love to hear from you if you have any comments, feedback, or suggestions! You can also explore other courses made by Educative.



Review the concepts covered throughout this course.

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

Conclusion

Final words