Automate server configuration with Ansible
26.04.2019 , i4
Sprache: English

Ansible is a free & open-source tool, that helps converting common server configuration tasks into playbooks. These simplify and streamline configuration steps, that you can apply to many systems at once, or to manage configuration drift. This workshop will give an example on managing a small test system with a few Virtual Machines and how can that afterwards be applied to real life systems at scale.


Ansible is the most popular open source automation tool on GitHub today with more than a quarter million downloads per month. Its power comes from (relatively) easily understandable playbooks that describe the steps you want to perform on a given system, to bring it to a certain state. This enables you to automate system administration and cut down the time from a blank to a working system significantly. It makes it likewise easy to provision parallel systems with minor modifications, such as maintaining a development, test and production system.

In this workshop certain phrases like "roles", "playbooks", "tasks", "templates" and more will be explained and shown with a hands-on Ansible walkthrough, what are their roles and how they are used to achieve a safe and efficient way to provision many systems at once.

Participants are welcome (and also encouraged) to follow along! Preferably on their own laptops!

Working with Linux systems for many years now and being a big fan of automation tools. Regularly following the latest DevOps developments, which are often (unintentionally) accompanied with spending more time debugging the systems than configuring them.