
Show HN: Ansible Crash Course - movedx
Hi Everyone.<p>My name is Mike. I&#x27;ve created a free Ansible Crash Course. It&#x27;s a course aimed at people who are new to Ansible and want to get up and running quickly. It goes into a fair amount of detail on most topics, but should something be missing just let me know and I&#x27;ll add it in.<p>Any and all help would be greatly appreciated! Just note an email address is required to register for the course - this is a limitation of the platform I&#x27;m using to host the course. Sorry about that!<p>The course can be found over here: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thecloud.coach&#x2F;ansible-crash-course<p>Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!<p>Thanks a bunch,<p>Mike.
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kstenerud
This won't be really helpful to you since you've already built it, but I'm the
kind of person who doesn't like videos. I AM interested in Ansible, but I
don't want to sit through videos about it; I want to read and follow the
examples as I do.

Actually, I wonder what the split is between people who prefer videos vs
people who prefer reading?

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scaryclam
If it's a video, I'm very likely to just hit the back button. I skim read far
faster than a video is capable of giving me the information and I can't copy
and edit example code from a video. I get that some people like videos, but
unless there's a transcript, I'm not going to be using it. Now, if it's a
general talk on a subject, a video is great as the speaker can entertain as
the talk. But if it's tutorials, please write the article's to go with it.

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nitemice
I think you've hit on a good compromise: videos with a transcript (including
code examples).

That way, people who want a video have a video (with the bonus of something to
read-along to), and people who want text have text.

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meddlepal
I really wish there was a configuration management tool out there with a
statically typed API. I've spent countless hours debugging Ansible's YAML
which gets really unwieldy with hundreds or thousands of tasks.

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breatheoften
Pulumi comes the closest that I’ve seen —
[https://www.pulumi.com/](https://www.pulumi.com/)

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cheshire_cat
This seems to work only with cloud providers, not with dedi boxes / VPSs?

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eropple
"Cloud?" It can work with anything with an API. If there's a Terraform
provider that they or the community hasn't projected into TypeScript (or
whatever) you can do that yourself with minimal effort. Not sure what else
you'd want.

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fock
How about plain old SSH? like all those low-end-boxes, you know ;).

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eropple
I could write a provider to do so in a couple hours if one doesn't already
exist.

But frankly, if you're using those boxes you've already decided that your time
is worth less than your money and spending time on automation is probably
lower ROI than moving to something, anything, with an API.

Anything that isn't IBM, anyway.

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fock
Cool, if your provider will have a tested way to install packages,
copy/template files and setup services beyond docker. Basically
Ansible/Saltstack/Puppet/Chef _are_ the API for plain UNIX.

As for the great "time worth less than money"-argument - I host my own
nextcloud (for me and my family) on such a VPS for ~USD9. I get some 100GB of
storage, ample RAM and CPU; sure that's probably oversubscribed, but after
setup I can leave it running for years without worrying to check my
bandwidth/storage quota in addition to it being cheaper than any big cloud-
provider. Initial setup works with cloudinit and managing the VMs itself has
an API. And I suppose for everyone not running a customer-facing business, the
ROI of such solutions is basically unparalleled ;).

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eropple
Thanks for the lecture; I didn't spend three years teaching Chef at a Fortune
100, I promise.

You get that one can just write a thing to kick off instance-level CM if it
doesn't exist, yeah? Like I don't know if it does for Pulumi because Pulumi
doesn't seem to care much about trailing-edge systems--for now at least, it
seems, they have a big enough market without having to stretch backwards--but
it's not complicated; Terraform already has provisioners to do exactly that,
so the pattern exists.

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berbec
Looks really interesting. My jobs is talking about implementing Ansible, so
I'll definately be taking this and providing feedback!

Thanks for the knowledge donation.

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movedx
You're welcome, friend.

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tpayne84
One suggestion: Once one video ends, it would be nice if we would be re-
directed or if the following video would load automatically. Presently, I have
to manually navigate from the current topic to the next and then activate the
video to begin playing... This is of course very minor, but it would still be
a nice update.

[edit: fix spelling fail]

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slenk
What will me email address be used for?

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praveenster
Not op but it is mentioned in the Show HN blurb above:

> Just note an email address is required to register for the course - this is
> a limitation of the platform I'm using to host the course. Sorry about that!

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yjftsjthsd-h
That doesn't quite seem like an answer. Can I put in a fake address? If I put
in a real address, will the platform decide to spam me?

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slenk
Like, can I use [https://temp-mail.org/en/](https://temp-mail.org/en/) or will
I need the email to access the material at a future date?

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webwanderings
This is very nice and effective. I just wish you had spent time in using the
real world examples related to the server configs, instead of using the
examples of hello-world, list of a, b, c, etc.

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movedx
That's coming, for sure :-)

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sciencesama
very few people understand the basics and you hit right on the point it is a
state management with configuration as code and others can contribute to your
work and approve the changes you are going to make rather than just you go
make them, you can test the configurations on test machines before throwing
into real world so you are adding extra set of eyes to prevent catastrophe.

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movedx
Thanks! That's exactly it!

If we move into a future where everything is configured as code, I think
that'll be of great benefit. Secondly, I think people will - by default - just
become programmers. That can only be a good thing, I reckon.

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coderinsg
well constructed course! Comprehensive. Thanks for the effort, I bet you spent
lots of time into it.

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movedx
About a week of work :-)

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jadia
I'm more inclined towards watching videos rather than reading books or
articles. It's quick and introduces to various best practices. I started
ansible with playbooks. I didn't know about the adhoc commands until now. Nice
content! Keep going.

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commandercheng
I agree, you have done a very good job keeping the videos short and focused.
We use Ansible my job, and it's always been a bit of a dark art to me. Very
much appreciate these videos.

