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

# Overview

**Conditionals** are used to control the execution of tasks or playbooks based on specific conditions. They enable us to make our automation responsive to the state of a managed node, the value of a variable, or other factors. Ansible supports conditional statements using the `when` keyword, and it's a powerful tool for creating flexible and adaptive automation workflows. 

# Working with conditionals

Conditionals are useful in a couple of scenarios. Let's imagine that we're responsible for managing a fleet of servers in a large data center, and we need to automate the deployment of a critical software update. However, the update is complex and resource-intensive, so we want to only apply it to a specific subset of servers based on various conditions. We can use conditionals for this kind of scenario.

There are various keywords used to enforce conditions in Ansible, such as:

- The `when` statement
- The `failed_when` statement
- The `changed_when` statement

## The **`when`** statement

The `when` statement is used to specify a condition under which a task should be executed. If the condition evaluates to true, the task is executed; otherwise, it is skipped. 

As shown below, a relevant example is ensuring the creation of symbolic links between NGINX site configurations in the `sites-available` and `sites-enabled` directories and then triggering the handlers that reload and restart NGINX.

Learn how to control task executions using conditionals.

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

Conditionals

Overview

Working with conditionals

The `when` statement