This intermediate and beyond level Ansible course is designed to help you take your automation skills to the next level with hands-on practice and expert guidance. The goal is to help you write better playbooks, manage automation across complex environments, and feel more confident working with the advanced features Ansible offers. The class is intended for those who already have some experience writing playbooks and using roles, and are ready to build smarter, faster, and more reliable automation.

Here are some of the core skills you can expect to achieve:

• Write cleaner, more reusable playbooks. Learn how to organize your automation using real-world patterns like blocks, error handling, async tasks, and reusable logic so your playbooks are easier to manage and maintain.
• Work confidently with Execution Environments and ansible-navigator. Understand how to build, run, and troubleshoot with Execution Environments so your automation is consistent and portable across different teams and platforms.
• Use dynamic inventories in multi-cloud setups. Get hands-on experience pulling live inventory from AWS, Azure, and other sources so you can automate dynamic infrastructure with confidence.
• Build and test your own Ansible plugins and collections. Create custom filters and content to meet your team’s needs and learn how to test them using tools like Molecule and GitHub Actions.
• Improve performance and scale your automation. Learn how to tune Ansible for large environments, reduce run times, and make your automation more efficient without sacrificing clarity.
• Automate smarter with Ansible Controller and Event-Driven Ansible. Use tools like surveys, workflows, and event rulebooks to build automation that reacts to real-world triggers and supports team workflows.

Throughout the course, you will practice these skills with hands-on labs and projects so you can apply what you learn immediately in your own environment.

If your team requires different topics, additional skills or a custom approach, our team will collaborate with you to adjust the course to focus on your specific learning objectives and goals.

This is an advanced-level course created for IT professionals who already have experience working with Ansible and want to strengthen and expand their automation skills. It is especially well-suited for system administrators, DevOps engineers, cloud specialists, and infrastructure teams who are responsible for managing and scaling automation in real environments. You should be comfortable writing playbooks, using roles, and working from the command line before joining the class.

Please note that this list of topics is based on our standard course offering, evolved from current industry uses and trends. We will work with you to tune this course and level of coverage to target the skills you need most. Course agenda, topics and labs are subject to adjust during live delivery in response to student skill level, interests and participation. The course tools, topics, use cases and hands-on labs can also be easily adjusted to suit your specific needs, goals or requirements. Please inquire for details and options.

Welcome & Quick Refresher

Kick off the course with a brief review of core Ansible concepts, identify common pain points, and get everyone on the same page with a quick, fun refresher.

• Inventory types
• Variable precedence
• ansible-config view
• Lab: Lightning quiz and “pitfalls bingo” to warm up and surface common gotchas.

1: Ansible Architecture Deep-Dive

Explore how Ansible works under the hood by walking through its core architecture and execution flow, so you can better understand performance, debugging, and optimization.

• ansible-core vs Collections
• Python execution path
• Strategy plugins
• Fact cache back-ends
• Lab: Trace a task’s lifecycle using ANSIBLE_STRATEGY=debug to see what really happens behind the scenes.

2: Execution Environments & ansible-navigator

Learn how Execution Environments make automation more portable and consistent across teams and tools, and how to build and run them effectively.

• Why Execution Environments (EEs) replace virtualenvs
• Building EE images
• Collections in image
• Content Signatures
• Lab: Build your own custom EE and run playbooks interactively with ansible-navigator.

3: Collections & Galaxy/Automation Hub

Understand how to create, version, and share reusable automation content with Collections, and how to manage them securely in private hubs.

• Semantic versioning
• Dependency chaining
• Private Galaxy servers
• Signed content
• Lab: Publish a custom collection to a local Galaxy server.

4: Playbook Patterns

Refine your playbook writing style with advanced patterns that help structure your automation cleanly, handle errors gracefully, and reuse logic efficiently.

• Blocks & rescue
• Loops with set_fact
• async / poll
• check / diff
• run_once + delegate_to
• import vs include
• Lab: Take a messy playbook and refactor it into well-organized, composable blocks.

5: Dynamic Inventory Mastery

Gain confidence using dynamic inventory sources to automate across cloud platforms and data centers, adapting quickly to real-world infrastructure changes.

• Inventory plugins (AWS, Azure, NetBox)
• Inventory scripts
• hostvars search paths
• Lab: Generate and manage a dynamic multi-cloud inventory and tag hosts for targeting.

6: Developing Custom Content

Extend Ansible to fit your unique use cases by creating your own modules and plugins, and learn how to test and document them properly.

• Module API v2
• Action, lookup, filter plugins
• ansible-doc
• Collection tests
• Lab: Write and test a custom filter plugin to clean up and standardize tag names.

7: Testing & CI/CD

Build confidence in your automation by integrating tests into your workflow and using modern CI/CD tools to validate changes automatically.

• ansible-test
• Molecule v6
• GitHub Actions matrix
• Ephemeral runners
• Lab: Set up Molecule with Docker and integrate tests into a pull request workflow.

8: Performance at Scale

Learn how to identify and fix performance bottlenecks when automating at scale, using built-in strategies, tuning options, and caching.

• Forks vs strategy
• Pipelining
• Mitogen
• Fact caching with Redis
• Linear vs free strategies
• Lab: Benchmark a 200-host run and tune Ansible for a 30% performance improvement.

9: Security & Compliance

Secure your automation by managing secrets correctly, enabling signing and FIPS compliance, and automating standard compliance checks.

• Vault v2
• Ansible Vault alternatives (HashiCorp Vault, AWS KMS)
• Signing playbooks
• FIPS mode
• Automating CIS benchmarks
• Lab: Rotate vaulted secrets and rekey securely using Execution Environments.

10: Automation Controller / AWX Advanced

Go beyond the basics in Automation Controller (or AWX) by managing workflows, access, and integrations to orchestrate complex automation at scale.

• RBAC
• Surveys
• Workflow job templates
• Schedule & notifications
• Callback tokens
• Lab: Build a workflow that includes approvals and Slack notifications.

11: Event-Driven Ansible (EDA)

Discover how to make your automation proactive by responding to real-time events using rulebooks and the EDA framework.

• Rulebooks
• Event sources (Kafka, webhooks, SNMP traps)
• ansible-rulebook CLI
• Lab: Trigger an automated deployment from a Git push event.

12: Network & Cloud Automation

Apply Ansible to configure and audit networks and cloud platforms using reliable, idempotent automation.

• ansible.netcommon basics
• Idempotent network modules
• Cloud control planes (AWS GuardDuty, Azure Policy)

13: Kubernetes & OpenShift

Automate container orchestration platforms by combining Ansible with Kubernetes and OpenShift tools for deployments and GitOps workflows.

• kubernetes.core collection
• Helm orchestrations
• GitOps hand-off
• Lab: Deploy a multi-tier application to OpenShift using Ansible.

14: Building Self-Service Catalogs

Learn how to build reusable, end-user-facing services using Controller catalogs and integrate them into enterprise ITSM tools.

• Service Catalogs in Controller
• Ansible Service Broker
• Integrating with ServiceNow
• Lab: Create and expose a “Request a Sandbox” catalog item.

15: Disaster Recovery & Maintenance

Be prepared for the worst by learning how to back up, restore, and safely maintain your Automation Controller and environments.

• Backing up Automation Controller
• EE registry backup
• Log aggregation
• Safe upgrades of core/collections
• Lab: Simulate a controller node failure and walk through the recovery process.

16: Capstone Project

Wrap up the course with a collaborative, end-to-end project that brings together everything you’ve learned into a real-world automation flow.

• Team design
• Peer review
• EDA trigger → Controller workflow → multi-cloud deployment
• Lab: Live demo of your automation project followed by a retrospective.