you need to learn Ansible RIGHT NOW!! (Linux Automation)

About this video

The creator introduces Ansible as a free, open-source IT automation tool owned by Red Hat that lets an administrator make a change once on a control node and push it to many Linux servers, Cisco routers and switches, cloud, Azure, AWS, and Windows machines, instead of logging into each device manually. He stresses that it is Python-based, requires no programming to start, and is agentless — it connects over SSH rather than requiring an agent on managed devices, which matters for network gear. In a lab built on CentOS 7 machines (one control node and two managed nodes), he edits the inventory/hosts file to define a Linux group, user and password, disables host key checking in ansible.cfg for lab use, then runs ad-hoc commands such as ansible ping, reading /etc/os-release, and rebooting both servers at once. He then explains playbooks: YAML files containing plays and tasks that use modules to declare a desired state. Installing the nano editor with the yum module demonstrates idempotency — the first run makes a change, a second run makes none because the state is already correct, and changing the state to absent removes it.

Key takeaways

• Ansible’s value is scale: define a change once on a control node and push it to an inventory of servers or network devices instead of repeating manual logins.
• Ansible is agentless and works over SSH, so it can manage devices like Cisco IOS routers and switches where installing an agent is not possible.
• The inventory (hosts) file lists managed machines and groups them; ansible.cfg and per-group variables define how Ansible connects to them.
• Ad-hoc commands are for quick one-off actions, while playbooks — YAML files of plays, tasks, and modules — are the organized, repeatable way to automate.
• Playbooks are idempotent: Ansible only makes a change when the actual state differs from the desired state declared in the task.

Episode details: published May 7, 2020 · 21:21 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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