Introduction to Ansible Transcripts
Chapter: What's Next
Lecture: What to Investigate Next
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You already know enough to handle a lot of scenarios with Ansible but here's a few areas for future research
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in case you want to move into more advanced topics. Several years ago, writing custom modules was fairly common
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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is that they have a page just asking you the question of whether you should develop your own module.
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Now, if you develop a module, you can keep it to yourself. You don't actually have to contribute it to Core Ansible
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which is primarily what this page is talking about. This page of docs does provide a nice thought process
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for figuring out whether you should build a new module. Take a look at bit.ly/ansibledefmodules. Another advanced topic for future research
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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
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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.
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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
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before digging into the Ansible modules. I strongly recommend taking a look at the scenario guides for hosting providers. They also provide context of
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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
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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
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where the community can share roles that they've developed. I found this more useful to find out how other people are accomplishing things
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rather than taking unedited roles because I always want to know what a role is doing and what tasks its using
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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
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how they test their playbooks and Ansible tries to mitigate the amount of testing you need to do by providing a fail-fast approach
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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
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rather than running the entire playbook breaking somewhere along the way and then taking a while to finish up.
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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
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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
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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
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set of structured files and directories you can quickly configure servers and deploy applications with Ansible. My name is Matt Makai.
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Thanks for joining me and happy coding.