Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: What's Next
Lecture: What to Investigate Next

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0:00 You already know enough to handle a lot of scenarios with Ansible but here's a few areas for future research
0:06 in case you want to move into more advanced topics. Several years ago, writing custom modules was fairly common
0:11 because Ansible didn't have the extensive set of well-tested modules that it does today so this has actually become less relevant over time.
0:18 But you should still think about whether you need to build a custom module you can't seem to accomplish something with the existing modules
0:24 or you just believe that the existing modules don't cover an edge case that you're trying to accomplish. With each of these topics
0:29 I've include a Bitly link at the bottom of the page so you can learn more about this. What's nice about the Ansible documentation
0:35 is that they have a page just asking you the question of whether you should develop your own module.
0:39 Now, if you develop a module, you can keep it to yourself. You don't actually have to contribute it to Core Ansible
0:44 which is primarily what this page is talking about. This page of docs does provide a nice thought process
0:49 for figuring out whether you should build a new module. Take a look at bit.ly/ansibledefmodules. Another advanced topic for future research
0:56 is taking a look at all the modules that exist for other hosting providers like AWS Google Cloud, OpenShift. Each of these cloud-hosting providers
1:04 has their own APIs and backend services. If you're already familiar with them you'd probably be very comfortable with the Ansible modules that exist.
1:10 If you're just trying to get up to speed with AWS or Google Cloud or Azure you probably want to play around with those services first
1:15 before digging into the Ansible modules. I strongly recommend taking a look at the scenario guides for hosting providers. They also provide context of
1:22 here's how you actually accomplish a deployment on AWS. Take a look at bit.ly/ansiblescenarioguides. There's actually a whole set of reusable roles
1:31 that we didn't talk about in this course and they're provided at Ansible Galaxy. Ansible Galaxy is a hosted service that Ansible provides
1:37 where the community can share roles that they've developed. I found this more useful to find out how other people are accomplishing things
1:43 rather than taking unedited roles because I always want to know what a role is doing and what tasks its using
1:49 but there's a lot of really great example code here for you. If you take a look at bit.ly/ansiblegalaxy. And finally, people often ask about
1:56 how they test their playbooks and Ansible tries to mitigate the amount of testing you need to do by providing a fail-fast approach
2:03 which means that the playbook should just simply stop when something errors out. That way, you know you have to go in and fix it
2:09 rather than running the entire playbook breaking somewhere along the way and then taking a while to finish up.
2:14 Still, there are ways to test your playbooks so you'll want to take a look at the Integrating Testing with Ansible Playbooks under Testing Strategies
2:20 found at bit.ly/ansibletestplaybooks. And with that, thank you for joining me for the last few hours in this course. Hope I was able to show you
2:27 why I really enjoy using this tool. I plan to use it for a long time to come and how by just writing some little bit of YAML
2:33 set of structured files and directories you can quickly configure servers and deploy applications with Ansible. My name is Matt Makai.
2:40 Thanks for joining me and happy coding.


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