Ansible can look intimidating, but with the right resources it can be fast and easy to setup.
I’ve always learned best in structured environments, so I dug through the weeds and found a relatively cheap Udemy series titled Ansible for Network Engineers by David Bombal. The course is listed as 5 hours, but plan on spending at least 15-20 hours if you are going to build your virtual environment and write playbooks alongside the video series.
David Bombal is a legend in the Cisco network engineering space and has provided hours worth of free content, including a free series for setting up a virtual environment for testing and developing your Ansible playbooks using GNS3!
If you follow my path, it’s important to know a few things… David Bombal’s Ansible course:
- Doesn’t cover best practices
- Only focuses on ios_command and ios_config Ansible modules
- Has poor compatibility with both physical and virtual Cisco Nexus devices
- Limits functionality and scalability to large enterprises
The most important takeaway is this – I just started.
Start today and test in a virtual environment. You are going to make mistakes, but that’s okay! Things will break, you’ll test new modules, and you will learn and get better!
