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

# YAML and its structure

YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a data serialization language. In Ansible, we use YAML for writing configuration files because it's human friendly.

YAML files can either have a `.yaml` or a `.yml` file extension. The following code snippet shows two YAML files, `config.yaml` and `config.yml`:

   ```YAML
   config.yaml
   config.yml
   ```

# Components of a YAML file

When we write our configurations using YAML, the overall structure of our configuration is made up of the following major components:

- Document separator
- Key-value pairs
- Indentation
- Lists
- Dictionaries
- Comments

## Document separator

YAML files typically start with three hyphens `---`. This is optional, but it's a good practice to always include it in our configuration files. Here is a sample YAML configuration that shows how a YAML file starts:

# sample_file.yml
---
# configuration continues

## Key-value pairs
In YAML, we use key-value pairs to define properties of elements. A key is typically followed by a colon (`:`) and then the corresponding value. Whether the value needs to be enclosed in quotes or not depends on its data type. The values of string elements are enclosed in either double or single quotes, while numbers and booleans are usually not.

The following example shows a typical definition of the required properties for a MySQL database in an Ansible configuration:

Learn how to use YAML format for writing Ansible playbooks.

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

Introduction to YAML

YAML and its structure

Components of a YAML file

Document separator

Key-value pairs