11 automation guides to enhance your Ansible skills

In 2020, we continued to witness a growing interest in IT automation. As sysadmins and IT professionals continue embracing the idea of automating trivial tasks, they improve their efficiency, allowing them to manage more systems with fewer issues. At Enable Sysadmin, IT automation is synonymous with Ansible.

Ansible is a powerful open source automation, orchestration, and configuration management solution that allows users to automate IT environment by applying the concepts of infrastructure as code. To me, of all Ansible's benefits, its versatility is what stands out. Enable Sysadmin's top Ansible articles in 2020 highlight this versatility in a nice way:

• Are you starting with Ansible? The inspiring Renewing my thrill at work with Ansible article by Joseph Tejal and Seth Kenlon's well-organized piece Understanding YAML for Ansible have you covered.
• Looking into writing your first playbooks? Take a look at Jörg Kastning's guide to Add a repo and install a package the Ansible way, Anthony Critelli's Deploying a static website with Ansible, or my own article, How to use Ansible to configure Vim for ready-to-use examples that will get you started.
• When you're ready to explore more advanced concepts, dive into Kent Pirkle's concise examples of Ansible's validation and error handling techniques with Using Ansible to verify configurations. Another piece by Anthony Critelli, 5 ways to harden a new system with Ansible, is a must-read for those with a security focus.
• If you're interested in deploying and managing containers with Ansible, then look at another great article, Building, saving, and loading container images with Ansible, by Anthony Critelli. When you're ready to deploy your containers in Kubernetes, Shiwani Biradar's popular guide An introduction to Kubespray provides you the resources you need to deploy your own cluster.
• Finally, if you're looking into using Ansible to deploy virtual machines instead of containers, then the series Automate virtual machine deployment with Ansible: Design and Automate virtual machine deployment with Ansible: Automation by Ashraf Hassan give you an in-depth view of designing and building an automation process.

No matter your background or level of experience, if you're interested in automation, I am sure there's an article in this list for you. Grab your coffee or other preferred beverage, and enjoy the best Ansible articles from 2020.

[ Need more on Ansible? Take a free technical overview course from Red Hat. Ansible Essentials: Simplicity in Automation Technical Overview. ]