Good evening,
I am a student learning development on my own. This is my first open source coding project.
As a former IT Help Desk intern, I am interested in ansible because I see how useful it could be to someone working in that capacity and higher ones. Even though I am intrigued by this project, I regrettably have not learned about the specifics of many things ansible does like “cloud provisioning”. I don’t want to let this daunt me, so could anyone send me some resources for understanding some of the system administration features ansible makes easier? Ideally, I’d like to begin contributing to the project as soon as I have a comprehensive, even if comparatively shallow, understanding of the features ansible deals with.
Thank you,
LiAna Curry-De Salas
Hi LiAna,
Usually it helps when using a tool if you have a specific problem to solve with it.
In the case of cloud provisioning, a good one would be learning to manage a small set of machines in AWS (or any other cloud that we support), where Ansible can first bring up those machines from nothing and then configure workloads on them.
However, cloud provisioning is probably not the easiest place in Ansible to get started with – I’d probably recommend diving into basic things like perhaps building a role to install and configure Apache on a server instance first.
It may take some time to build the Ansible content to automate this, but where Ansible then saves time is in rebuilding the server (just one command and wait a few minutes, versus taking maybe 20-30 minutes to do it manually) or building out more servers like it (where adding 50 servers of the same type from scratch then beomes no problem).
Then, probably learn more about that particular cloud from using it’s web console first. Once you understand how to see what you have deployed into the cloud, experimentation with Ansible modules to programatically control what is running in that cloud will be easier to try out.
Amazon offers the ability to run a micro instance or two for free. Also, right now Google is running a very nice promotion where there’s $300 of credit available for instance - https://cloud.google.com/free-trial/.
Let me know if you have any specific questions – learning a whole cloud ecosystem can be a bit of a chunk to bite off, but knowledge of them is definitely in demand. Though I would recommend learning Ansible for configuration and application management first – just because that’s the original purpose of it, and the cloud idioms are a bit more “on top” of that base of knowledge, so it will make sense if you get those down first.
–Michael
Thanks Michael. If I have questions while exploring ansible this way, I’ll ask you.
LiAna