10 Best Ansible Courses and Certifications Online

When it comes to automating IT tasks, Ansible has become a popular tool for many organizations. As a result, there has been a growing demand for online courses that teach how to effectively use Ansible. With so many options available, it can be difficult to determine which courses are the best fit for your needs. In this article, we will explore some of the top Ansible courses available online, and provide an overview of their content and features.

Here’s a look at the Best Ansible Courses and Certifications Online and what they have to offer for you!

10 Best Ansible Courses and Certifications Online

1. Ansible for the Absolute Beginner – Hands-On – DevOps by Mumshad Mannambeth, KodeKloud Training (Udemy) (Our Best Pick)

The Ansible for the Absolute Beginner – Hands-On – DevOps Course is designed to introduce beginners in DevOps to the fundamental concepts of Ansible. This course features hands-on exercises that can be practiced directly in the browser. Students will learn the basic use cases of Ansible, followed by an introduction to Ansible Inventory, Playbooks, Modules, Variables, Conditionals, Loops, and Roles. Each lecture is complemented by a set of coding exercises that provide a hands-on experience in developing Ansible Playbooks.

The animated slides that accompany each lecture make the course easy to understand. This course is unique because it provides coding exercises where students can practice Ansible Playbooks directly in their browser. According to student testimonials, this course offers wonderful content and explanations, and is a great getting started guide with hands-on experience.

Ansible is an IT automation platform that simplifies the deployment of applications and systems. It eliminates the need to write scripts or custom code for deploying and updating applications by automating the process in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, and without any agents to install on remote systems.

It’s important to note that Ansible® and Ansible Tower® are registered trademarks of Ansible, Inc. in the United States and other countries. This course is not certified, accredited, affiliated with, nor endorsed by Ansible, Inc.

The course is composed of Introduction, Lab – Setup VMs and Install Ansible, Ansible Inventory, Introduction to YAML, Ansible Playbooks, Ansible Modules, Ansible Variables, Conditionals, Loops, Ansible Roles, and Advanced Topics.

2. Ansible for Network Engineers: Quick Start GNS3 & Ansible by David Bombal, Experts with David Bombal (Udemy)

The course “Ansible for Network Engineers: Quick Start GNS3 & Ansible” is a practical guide for network engineers who want to learn network automation and programming using Ansible, GNS3, and Cisco IOS. The course is designed to help network engineers program Cisco networks within 30 minutes. It includes demonstrations of configuring Cisco routers and switches in GNS3, configuring multiple VLANs on multiple switches, and configuring OSPF on a router, among other things.

The course covers the use of Ansible to troubleshoot networks and programmatically configure Cisco network devices using SSH, Ansible Network modules, Ansible Playbooks, and Ansible ad hoc commands. The course emphasizes practical examples of automating networks rather than just talking about it. The course teaches the use of tools available to automate networks quickly and easily.

The course is specifically created for network engineers and is different from other Ansible courses that focus on server administration tasks. The course aims to teach network engineers how to add network programmability using Ansible to their skill set, as the days of configuring Cisco networks only with the command line interface (CLI) are drawing to a close.

The course includes several sections, such as “GNS3 2.1 Install,” “Ansible Quick Start: Ad hoc commands,” “Ansible Quick Start: Playbooks and Cisco IOS Config module,” and more. The course also includes additional content on Cumulus Linux and Ansible Automation and Network Automation Appliance.

The course has received positive feedback from students, with many praising the practical examples and real-world application. Overall, the course provides a practical guide for network engineers who want to learn network automation and programming using Ansible, GNS3, and Cisco IOS.

3. Ansible Advanced – Hands-On – DevOps by Mumshad Mannambeth, KodeKloud Training (Udemy)

Course Title: Ansible Advanced – Hands-On – DevOps

Course Instructors: Mumshad Mannambeth, KodeKloud Training

Course Short Description: This course focuses on advanced concepts in Ansible and real-life use cases. It is designed for those with basic understanding of Ansible who wish to gain expertise in developing with Ansible.

What is in this Course?

This is the second course in the series on Ansible and introduces advanced topics such as roles, jinja2 templating, lookups, error handling, vault, etc. It also covers strategies, filters, and plugins and how to develop custom ones yourself. The course is for those who already have a basic understanding of Ansible and are willing to gain expertise in developing with Ansible.

Why should I enroll in THIS course?

The course is backed by animated slides and provides coding exercises that allow practice of Ansible Playbooks right in your browser. The lectures are structured and provide a hands-on learning experience, making it easier to understand advanced concepts in Ansible.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an IT automation platform that simplifies the deployment of applications and systems. It uses plain English and SSH to automate, eliminating the need to write scripts or custom code. There are no agents to install on remote systems, making it a straightforward system to use.

Legal Notice:

Ansible® and Ansible Tower® are registered trademarks of Ansible, Inc. in the United States and other countries. This course is not certified, accredited, affiliated with, nor endorsed by Ansible, Inc.

Course Content and Sections:

The course includes an introduction to Ansible, web application, file separation, roles, asynchronous actions, strategy, error handling, templating, lookups, vault, dynamic inventory, custom modules, and plugins.

4. Mastering Ansible by Chris Lunsford (Udemy)

The Mastering Ansible course is a comprehensive guide to configuration management and orchestration with Ansible. The course is structured as a step-by-step journey through configuring a realistic application stack, with topics organized in order of complexity. In addition to core Ansible concepts, the course covers building tools for maintaining and troubleshooting applications using Ansible playbooks committed to a repository for continuous improvement. The course comprises six sections, starting with installation and foundational concepts, building up a sample application environment layer-by-layer in section three, and refactoring setup in section four with an emphasis on modularity and encapsulation. Section five covers optimization techniques for playbook execution time, with a final section on troubleshooting and testing.

Each lecture introduces a new Ansible concept applied to playbooks, with demonstrations in the demo environment, and relevant documentation pages and codebase snapshots provided in lecture notes. The course was built with Ansible version 1.9.3 applied to a 3-tiered web application environment using NGINX, Apache2, Python, and MySQL on Ubuntu Linux servers. Administration of Windows servers is not covered in this course.

The Mastering Ansible course is designed as an introduction to Ansible and a guide for engineers interested in configuration management, orchestration, infrastructure-as-code, and devops principles. The course content is structured into eight sections: Introduction, Preparation, Foundation, Playbooks, Modular Configuration with Roles, Advanced Execution, Troubleshooting, Testing, & Validation, and Appendix.

5. Dive Into Ansible – From Beginner to Expert in Ansible by James Spurin, DiveInto Publications (Udemy)

Dive Into Ansible is a professional video course that aims to help users master Ansible, a simple IT automation engine. The course covers a range of topics from Ansible’s architecture to advanced playbooks, using Ansible with cloud services and containers, and troubleshooting and testing. The latest version of Ansible is used throughout the course, and all content is available in 1080p with subtitles/closed captions. The course also includes hands-on exercises, quizzes, and a playbook project with an Ansible-themed game. The instructor, James Spurin, has over 20 years of experience in IT and is an active contributor to opensource projects including Ansible.

The course has received several updates, with the latest Ansible version (2022 v5.x) and full lab now included. The course lab can be run from Google Cloudshell using a free account. The lab environment and Docker containers are available as opensource, and the course is accessible on Windows/Mac & Linux on x86 based systems as well as ARM architectures.

Updates have also been made to the course content, with refreshed links and fixes/corrections for minor changes. The course now includes the Ansible Gym learning challenges, and on-screen QR codes for external resources. The course lab has been significantly enhanced, with the lab now running entirely as containers in Docker and accessible from the web browser.

The course author, James Spurin, is a skilled IT professional with an MSc in Computer Science and over 20 years of experience. He has worked for major organizations including Dell EMC, Goldman Sachs, Nomura, and Virgin Internet. Spurin is also an active contributor to opensource software and many projects, including Ansible.

6. Automation with Ansible Playbooks by Narendra P (Udemy)

The Automation with Ansible Playbooks course is designed for automation engineers with experience managing various infrastructure components, such as operating systems, application configurations, and deployments. The course aims to teach students how to automate local and cloud configuration management tasks using Ansible Playbooks.

The course covers a range of topics including installing and configuring Ansible, working with ad-hoc commands, inventories (both static and dynamic), and password authentication setup. Students will also learn how to use Ansible variables and write basic Playbooks.

Additional course content focuses on working with Managed nodes, basic concepts for writing Playbooks, and working with Visual Studio Code Editor for Ansible Playbooks. The course also covers operations on strings and numbers using Playbooks, operators to work with tasks, conditional statements, handlers, loops, tags, error handling, and reusable concepts with import_tasks and include_tasks.

The course concludes with practical applications such as Tomcat Installation and Configuration using Playbook, AWS Provisioning using Ansible, and using Ansible Vault to protect Playbooks with encryption.

Overall, the Automation with Ansible Playbooks course is intended for those seeking to manage systems and application configurations effectively and in an automated way, with a focus on minimizing the learning curve.

7. Ansible for the DevOps Beginners & System Admins by AR Shankar | Valaxy Technologies (Udemy)

The Ansible for DevOps Beginners and System Admins course, offered by AR Shankar of Valaxy Technologies, aims to enhance the skills of DevOps engineers and system administrators towards Ansible. The course covers several topics, including ad-hoc commands, playbooks, variables, inventory, and roles, with detailed examples. By the end of the course, students should be able to automate regular tasks using Ansible. The instructor plans to continue enhancing the course based on feedback and reviews.

The course covers the basics of Ansible, including its purpose and how it works. Students will learn how to prepare an Ansible system on AWS, install Ansible on an EC2 instance, and set up RHEL as an Ansible managed node. They will also learn about Ansible ad-hoc commands, inventory, configuration files, modules, and creating their first Ansible playbook. Students will also learn how to run a playbook, use the Yum module to install packages, the file module to create or remove a file, and the copy module to copy a file.

Students will also learn how to install Apache on RHEL and Ubuntu, use notify and handlers in a playbook, understand how gather facts and when condition work, and how to uninstall Apache using a when condition. The course covers using lists and with_items, Ansible variables, converting shell commands into Ansible-playbook, and using tags in a playbook. Students will also learn about error handling in an Ansible playbook, Ansible vault introduction, using Ansible vault with git, Ansible roles, and converting a playbook into a role.

The course’s content is divided into several sections, including Introduction, Prepare Ansible lab environment, Ansible components, Ansible playbooks, Modules, Multitask Ansible Playbooks, Notify and Handlers, Gather facts, Conditions, Ansible Variables, Additional concepts, Ansible Vault, Ansible Roles, and Bonus Lecture.

8. Learning Path: Automation with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt by Packt Publishing (Udemy)

The Learning Path: Automation with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt, offered by Packt Publishing, is aimed at providing learners with the knowledge and skills necessary to automate their IT infrastructure effectively. The course covers three popular automation tools: Ansible, Puppet, and Salt, and explains their advantages.

The course is presented in a stepwise manner, where each video builds on the skills learned in the video before it. The course begins with a focus on Ansible and teaches learners how to manage environments, implement strategies, and use enterprise tooling such as Ansible Galaxy and Tower.

The course then moves on to Puppet, which is a configuration management tool used to automate all IT configurations. Learners will first understand the Puppet ecosystem and then learn about detailed topics such as configuration and management of Puppet servers, environments, module repositories, and reusable modules.

The course concludes with Salt, where learners will start with the basics such as installing, configuring, deploying, and managing a web application to advanced concepts like Docker containers across multiple systems behind a HAProxy load balancer. By the end of the course, learners will be able to build and manage their infrastructure and fully utilize its potential.

The course is authored by David Cohen, Anirban Saha, and Seth House, who are experienced professionals in the field of automation and infrastructure management. The course includes three sections: Ansible 2 for Beginners, Puppet Essentials for Beginners, and Learning Salt.

Overall, the Learning Path: Automation with Ansible, Puppet, and Salt, provided by Packt Publishing, offers a comprehensive introduction to automation tools and their advantages, allowing learners to effectively manage and automate their IT infrastructure.

9. Automation with Ansible Playbooks – Hands On !! by Shikhar Verma • 50k+ Students Worldwide (Udemy)

This course, “Automation with Ansible Playbooks – Hands On!!”, introduces Ansible to beginners and system administrators to enhance their skills in Ansible. The course covers the following topics: introduction to Ansible, deploying Ansible, Ansible installation on Red Hat Linux 8, implementing playbooks, managing variables and inclusions, implementing task control, Ansible roles, industrial projects to automate patching on multiple Linux servers and stop/start Control M appl/db, and creating an automation tool using Ansible and Shell.

The first module of the course covers an overview of Ansible architecture, Ansible components, Ansible deployments, describing Ansible inventory, and installation of Ansible. The second module covers Ansible installation on Red Hat Linux 8, including online and offline installation and user account setup for passwordless authentication.

The third module covers how to write YAML files, implementing modules, and implementing Ansible playbooks. The fourth module covers managing variables and inclusions, managing facts, and managing inclusions.

The fifth module covers implementing task control, constructing flow control, implementing handlers, implementing tags, and handling errors. The sixth module covers Ansible roles, how to create them, and lab sessions to create them.

The seventh module covers an industrial project to automate patching on multiple Linux servers using Ansible playbook. The eighth module covers an industrial project to stop/start Control M appl/db, including designing Ansible playbooks and lab sessions.

The ninth module covers the overview of an automation tool, the concept of an automation tool, communication between Ansible server with managed hosts, pre-validation configuration, user administration, run ad hoc command, and health check statistics. The tenth module covers designing the automation tool, shell scripting, and practice lab sessions on case statement and color fonts.

Overall, this course covers a comprehensive range of topics related to Ansible and provides lab sessions to enhance practical knowledge.

10. Ansible Tower Overview by Shikhar Verma • 50k+ Students Worldwide (Udemy)

The Ansible Tower Overview course is designed for IT professionals who use Ansible and need to centrally manage their Ansible projects in a way that scales to large teams and complex enterprise installations. The course is instructed by Shikhar Verma and has over 50,000 students worldwide.

The course covers various topics, starting with an introduction to Ansible Tower and its features, followed by the setup and installation of Ansible Tower. It also includes an overview of Ansible setups, AD-Hoc commands, and running playbooks.

The course provides an orientation to the Ansible Tower web interface, including an overview of the Tower Dashboard, resources like templates, credentials, projects, and inventories, and lab sessions for running jobs to update content in files or restart a service.

The course also covers the creation and management of users and teams for role-based access control. It provides an overview of RBAC, creating and managing Ansible Tower users, various user types, and lab sessions for delegating permissions to normal users to execute a job template, access, edit or update an inventory or run an AD-Hoc command. Managing users with teams is also covered in the course.

In addition, the course covers the creation and management of inventories and credentials, including the creation of a static inventory, machine credentials for access to inventory hosts, and the use of GitHub for managing Ansible projects. The course provides an overview of dynamic inventories and configuring them for AWS EC2 environments.

Overall, the Ansible Tower Overview course provides comprehensive training on deploying and using Ansible Tower to manage existing Ansible projects and playbooks.