Ansible: automate changes and recover services

Objectives and progression

A six-module technical course on infrastructure automation and production support. Learn to scope inventory, maintain repeatable state, validate configuration, coordinate batches, and protect secrets. Includes fictional APS scenarios, inspected Ansible Community documentation, and an internal assessment of 24 decisions in 60 minutes. Executor, collection, and plugin differences are explicit.

Audience: APS L2/L3, infrastructure, SRE, systems administration teams, and technical managers.

Prerequisites: Application, monitoring, and production-support fundamentals; no bank-specific internal process assumed.

300 estimated study minutes

• Confirm which hosts, variables, and versions a run will use.
• Choose modules and results that represent the actual change.
• Validate before activating configuration and understand simulation limits.
• Control concurrency, shared dependencies, and stopping criteria.
• Protect secrets during storage, execution, and diagnosis.
• Interpret failures and reconcile changes before resuming execution.

Modules

1. Inventory and execution context
2. Tasks and desired state
3. Validation and handlers
4. Batch orchestration
5. Secrets and privileges
6. Failures and recovery

Continue learning

Technical assessments

• Terraform
• CI/CD
• RHCE — Red Hat Certified Engineer in Ansible
• Linux Administration

References and version

Ansible community 14 / ansible-core 2.21 documentation consulted 2026-09-30; executor, collection and plugin compatibility requires confirmation

• How to build your inventory · 2026-09-30
• Patterns: targeting hosts and groups · 2026-09-30
• Ansible playbooks · 2026-09-30
• Controlling how Ansible behaves: precedence rules · 2026-09-30
• Validating tasks: check mode and diff mode · 2026-09-30
• Error handling in playbooks · 2026-09-30
• Controlling playbook execution: strategies and more · 2026-09-30
• Handlers: running operations on change · 2026-09-30
• Blocks · 2026-09-30
• Controlling where tasks run: delegation and local actions · 2026-09-30
• ansible.builtin.template module · 2026-09-30
• ansible.builtin.command module · 2026-09-30
• Ansible Vault · 2026-09-30
• Using encrypted variables and files · 2026-09-30
• Logging Ansible output · 2026-09-30
• Understanding privilege escalation: become · 2026-09-30
• Roles · 2026-09-30
• ansible.builtin.ping module · 2026-09-30
• Releases and maintenance · 2026-09-30
• Ansible-core 2.21 roadmap · 2026-09-30
• ansible-playbook CLI reference · 2026-09-30