In this module, you will be introduced to some of the basics of Ansible. You will become familiar with some of Ansible’s fundamental architecture and components like inventory files, variables, and, most importantly, playbooks. You will also be introduced to the ios_config module, which is explicitly built for Cisco IOS devices and makes creating plays and tasks for your Cisco devices easier. Ansible has numerous modules available for many different vendors, operating systems, and technologies, and this course will discuss how to look up more information about them. You will also be introduced to Ansible Galaxy, a 3rd party repository for Ansible.

Typically, network engineers perform countless manual network operations and changes. The most common workflow is to build a Microsoft Notepad file or Microsoft Word document and call it a template. However, that template is only a set of instructions for building a configuration—it is not a real template. Jinja2 is a templating engine that is purpose-built for Python. You will learn about the Jinja2 templating engine and start to build programmatic templates and command “data” with real configuration templates.