Ansible Advanced — Complete Guide for Intermediate to Expert
Master advanced Ansible: dynamic inventory, custom modules, Ansible Vault best practices, Molecule testing, AWX/Tower, collections, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-cloud automation.
Tutorial Overview
This tutorial takes you from Ansible intermediate to expert. You’ll learn production-grade patterns used by teams managing large fleets across multiple clouds.
| Chapter | Topic | What You’ll Learn |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Advanced Playbook Patterns | Rolling updates, delegation, async |
| 2 | Dynamic Inventory | AWS, GCP, Azure, custom scripts |
| 3 | Custom Modules | Write Python modules for Ansible |
| 4 | Ansible Collections | Package and distribute automation |
| 5 | Advanced Ansible Vault | Multi-vault, SOPS, secrets at scale |
| 6 | Testing with Molecule | Unit and integration testing |
| 7 | AWX and Ansible Tower | Web UI, RBAC, job scheduling |
| 8 | Ansible in CI/CD Pipelines | GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins |
| 9 | Performance Tuning | Pipelining, Mitogen, caching |
| 10 | Security Hardening | CIS Benchmarks, compliance |
| 11 | Multi-Cloud Automation | AWS + GCP + Azure |
| 12 | Troubleshooting | Debug complex playbooks |
| 13 | Production Patterns | Zero-downtime, drift detection |
| 14 | Practice Projects | End-to-end labs |
| 15 | Next Steps | RHCE, AAP, Event-Driven Ansible |
Prerequisites
- Completed the Ansible Basics Tutorial (or equivalent experience)
- Comfortable with playbooks, variables, roles, and vault
- A Linux environment for practicing
