Top 5 Course to Learn Ansible for DevOps in 2020 - Best of Lot

If you are in DevOps space, then you might have heard about Ansible, one of the powerful tools for infrastructure automation. In the past, when you need to set up a server for your application you need to go to each server and install all the software and verify it. This slow, manual, and painful process of server setup is now over with tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Salt making there way. These are the tools that promote the idea of Infrastructure as code which also brings the added benefit of versioning and scaling when it comes to infrastructure automation.  If you are working towards a career in DevOps, your already a DevOps champion in your team, then learning about Ansible is a good idea, and you have come to the right place.

In this article, I am going to share some of the best courses to learn Ansible in 2020.  I have made the best efforts to include both beginners and advanced courses so that not only can learn Ansible from scratch but also take your Ansible skill to the next level with plugins and modules if you already know Ansible.

What is Ansible? Which problem does it solve?

If you don't know what Ansible is or heard the name Ansible first time, let me give you a quick overview. Ansible is a tool for automating server setup part. If you have worked as a developer and ever setup your UAT and production environment, then you know that there is a lot of effort involves in getting your server ready before you can run or install your application.

You need to manually install software like Java, Tomcat,  and Apache on each server, which can take a long time even if you have a handful of serves. Thankfully, all that can be automated now using Ansible.

All you need to do is create an Ansible playbook, much like a script, and then Ansible will do the setup and installation for you.

It's not that Ansible is the only tool that can do that as you also have Puppet , Chef , and SaltStack . Still, Ansible is probably the most straightforward tool as it can do all this using SSH, while others like Puppet require a dedicated agent installed on each server.

Ansible script, called Ansible playbook, can be writing using YAML (Yet Another Markup Language), which reads like English and doesn't require a lot of learning.

It's also backed by RedHat and can be customized using many Python plugins; all this makes Ansible a perfect choice for server setup and automation, and these courses are good places to kick-start your Ansible journey.

5 Best Courses to learn Ansible for DevOps in depth

Now that you know what Ansible is and how it can help with server setup, automation, and scalability, let's dive into some of the best courses to learn Ansible in depth. As I have said, the list includes both beginner and advanced Ansible courses so that you can learn from scratch and also level up your Ansible skills.

1. Ansible for the Absolute Beginner - Hands-On - DevOps

This is my #1 course for anyone who wants to learn Ansible from scratch. It's one of the best Ansible beginner course and will teach you to step by step about how to write Ansible playing book, build Ansible inventory files, and deploy software on several hosts.

The best part of the course is that it has hands-on exercises for writing Ansible investors, which you can practice in your browser. It also provides some introduction of YAML, which is used to write Ansible build scripts, also known as Playbook.

Packed with 2 hours of content, this course will teach you everything you need to learn to automate your web server deployment. Talking about social proof, this course has been trusted by more than 27,750 students who speak volumes about its quality. If you want to learn Ansible in 2020, this is the course you should join.

2. Mastering Ansible

This is another beginner-level course that provides a complete guide to configuration management and orchestration with Ansible. If you like project-based learning or fan of learn-by-doing, then this course is for you.

The course is designed as a journey through configuring a realistic application stack from the ground up. This means, Instead of going page-by-page through the Ansible documentation, topics are ordered to align with the growing complexity of our application as you build it up and refactor it.

It's another course I highly recommend to beginners learning Ansible. If you want not just to learn how to do to configuration management with Ansible but also how to create a very clean and sound ansible-playbook, then this course is for you.

3. Mastering Ansible Automation - Step by Step

If you want to start a career in IT automation and want to learn Ansible from the ground up, then this is the right course for you. In this course, Shikhar Verma will teach you Ansible Step by Step.

This is a very detailed course, and you will learn about things like implementing Ansible playbooks, writing YAML scripts, variables, scopes, modules, inventories, and all. The good thing is there I a guided exercise for all sections, which means you will be learning by doing.

The course not just provides an introduction of Ansible but shows many ways to use this tool and create a solid automation pipeline. If you can connect with an instructor, then this is an excellent course to learn Ansible.

4. Ansible Advanced - Hands-On - DevOps

As I have said at the start of this article that you will find both beginners and advanced Ansible course on this and keeping that promise, here is a course to learn and practice advanced topics in Ansible including Roles, Jinja2, Lookups, Filter.

This is a course you should take only after taking any of the first three courses, ideally the first one in the list, Ansible for the Absolute Beginner because this course is from the same instructor, Mumshad Mannambeth.

This is the second course in the series on Ansible, and in this course, you will learn some advanced concepts in Ansible and some real-life use cases like writing custom modules.

Btw, there are a couple of things which are different between beginner and this course like the OS used in the beginner course was CentOS, but this one uses Debian, which may take some time to setup environment.

5. Hands-on Ansible

This is a great course to learn Ansible on Pluralsight. The course starts with orchestration and change management fundamentals then moves to how Ansible works.

You will also build your test environment and along the way, go through several practical examples and features that Ansible provides.

After going through this course, you will be able to run ad-hoc commands across all your systems, write playbooks, and create roles using the hundreds of modules that come with Ansible. The course also has many hands-on demos to show how to implement your automation tasks.

Overall a great course to learn Ansible, but you need a Pluralsight membership to access this course, which costs around $299 per year. Alternatively, you can sign up for the 10-day free trial and take this course for free.

That's all about the Top 5 courses to learn Ansible in depth. As I have said, Ansible is a good tool to keep up to your sleeve, particularly for DevOps engineers. As a senior developer, I would also be knowing about Ansible so that I can play with those Ansible playbooks and understand how my servers are setup. You can also learn Ansible if you want a career in DevOps, it's definitely worth it.

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Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these Ansible online training courses, then please share it with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback, then please drop a note.

P. S. - If you are looking for some free courses to start your DevOps journey and learn essential tools like Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes then, you should check out this list of Free Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes courses for DevOps and Programmers.