--- short_description: > What if you could specify WHAT a system should look like and another tool took care of making that possible so you don't know HOW and can focus on just WHAT outcome is needed. That's what Ansible can do for you. long_description: > Dining out is convenient because you decide **WHAT** to eat, and someone else makes it for you. You don’t need to know **HOW** the sausage is made--literally--so long as the sausage is good! Unfortunately, all too often we are making our own meals instead of letting tools (chefs) help us out. That is when it comes to our own work and probably for many people when they get home too! This course can help with the former more than the latter, but perhaps it can give you some ideas for both! Ansible is a popular choice for IT automation because it allows you to concisely specify a desired state and then it does the heavy lifting to make that state a reality. And, it works on every level of IT automation from the network, to provisioning machines, to builds and it is especially known for configuration management of both systems and apps! Ansible is highly extensible and is comprised of a ginormous amount of core and community content to jumpstart just about any configuration you can imagine. It's time to move beyond just manually configuring servers. Beyond writing confusing scripts. Beyond a mess of servers that consume all of your time to keep in a desired state of configuration. So, I'll ask you, what if you could specify a desired state and let Ansible take care of bringing your machines into said desired state of configuration? Regardless how machines are setup, with Ansible you can specify WHAT and it will take care of the rest to figure out HOW to make your WHAT a reality. This eliminates inspecting the state of environments and determining what commands to call to reconfigure them. It spares you of needing to be an expert of every platform/tool/framework you manage. Let's face it, you have bigger fish to fry! So, in this course, Getting Started with Ansible, you will learn foundational knowledge to quickly and reliably configure machines. First, you will learn how to install Ansible and use the ansible Ad-hoc command line tool to execute one off (often idempotent) modules in Ansible to configure single, low level aspects of a system by describing a desired state. Next, you will discover how playbooks allow you to invoke multiple modules via tasks with the `ansible-playbook` command line tool to configure your local machine. Then, you'll see how to use `ansible-playbook` with inventories to configure multiple machines, both local and remote. You'll see how to use vagrant with Ansible to spin up a local, VM lab environment so you can configure them with ansible-playbook. Giving you a chance to simulate configuring multiple managed nodes with Ansible all on a local machine. No network of machines needed unless you want that! Between core, community and your own modules, as well as plugins and other aspects of the modularity of Ansible, it quickly becomes apparent that it is not possible to know everything about Ansible in a single life time and part of that is due to Ansible's broad support for a plethora of systems/tools many of which you will never need to use. So next you'll learn how to learn what you need to know, when you need to know it so you don't spend your entire life learning and instead can get something done from the get-go. Next, SSH is common for configuring systems so naturally it is used by default in Ansible for remote configurations. In this module you'll see more connection approaches beyond SSH. For example, the local connection plugin to bypass SSH when configuring a local machine. Or, `winrm` for configuring Windows machines. Or, the docker connection plugin to configure docker containers. And you'll see how we can invert Ansible's default push model with the `ansible-pull` command. Finally, you'll learn about reuse via (Ansible's Galaxy site)[galaxy.ansible.com] and corresponding ansible-galaxy command. You'll also briefly learn about the newly released Collections format contrasted with the historic Role format. Both of which afford learning and reuse opportunities beyond just what comes out of the box when installing Ansible. By the end of this course you'll know how to start using Ansible in your own work to reduce risk and maximize rewards. And how to evolve your understanding of Ansible.