Ansible For Network Automation, Part 1: Why Ansible?

Welcome to Ansible For Networking! There are ten video lessons in this course.

This course provides a detailed overview of how Ansible works, how to create playbooks and modules, the importance of idempotency, and a walk-through using Ansible to automate tasks in a Meraki WLAN.

It's intended for network administrators and engineers who want to explore Ansible for automating common tasks. Some familiarity with basic scripting will be helpful, though not required. The lesson assumes the learner is familiar with concepts such as variables, configuration files, and outputs.

Ansible approaches automation by taking a set of processes and breaking them down into in discrete units, called tasks. Tasks are then bundled into plays, and then multiple plays form a playbook.

Network engineers and administrators can use playbooks for a variety of operations, including automating deployments, backing up configurations, upgrading code, and more.

In this introduction video, Josh briefly discusses how Ansible can be used in network automation and describes some common use cases. He also outlines the material he’ll cover in each lesson in the course.

Additional materials are available in a GitHub repo:

Josh VanDeraa is a network engineer with more than 20 years of experience.

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