📄️ Table of contents
Free discovery course on Ansible in 7 pedagogical lessons. Understand IT automation, infrastructure as code, the inventory/playbook/module trinity, the agentless and idempotence principles, and real use cases.
📄️ 1 · The problem Ansible solves
Before Ansible, managing 100 servers was a manual hell. This lesson describes precisely why manual management does not scale, what configuration drift is and the infrastructure as code principle.
📄️ 2 · What is Ansible?
A rigorous definition of Ansible: agentless IT automation engine, YAML language, Red Hat ecosystem. History from Michael DeHaan in 2012 to Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform in 2026.
📄️ 3 · Inventory, playbook, module
Understand Ansible's three fundamental building blocks: the inventory (the address book), the playbook (the musical score) and the module (the specialist musician). Concrete YAML examples and pedagogical analogies.
📄️ 4 · Agentless and idempotence
The two innovations that made Ansible succeed against Puppet, Chef and SaltStack. Agentless: Ansible connects via SSH without installing anything. Idempotence: running several times gives the same result.
📄️ 5 · The Ansible ecosystem
A complete panorama of the Ansible ecosystem: Ansible Galaxy, AWX, Ansible Automation Platform, Collections, Molecule. An honest comparison with Terraform, Puppet, Chef and SaltStack in 2026.
📄️ 6 · Real use cases
Where Ansible is really used in 2026: configuration management, application deployment, patch management, cloud orchestration, network automation, security and compliance. Concrete cases.
📄️ 7 · Recap and FAQ
Summary of the Ansible discovery course, answers to the 14 most frequent beginner questions (Ansible Vault, loops, variables, security, testing) and the recommended next step.
📄️ 🏆 Quiz and attestation
Test your Ansible knowledge with a free 5-question quiz, corrected and explained: agentless, idempotence, inventory, playbook, modules.