Blog
Thoughts on engineering, design, and building great products.
A Complete Project and Series Wrap-Up
Putting it all together: a complete Ansible project that deploys an application with a role following best practices, running idempotently on a real server. Then cleaning up the infrastructure, recapping the journey from ad-hoc to custom modules, and pointers for what to learn next.
Installation and Your First Ad-hoc Commands
Set up the control node (install Ansible), prepare a host to manage, write the config and inventory files, then run your first ad-hoc commands: ping, command, shell, setup, and become to run as root.
Ansible Architecture: Control Node, Inventory, Module and SSH
Deep dive into Ansible's architecture: control node, managed node, inventory, module. And exactly what happens when you run a command — Ansible packages the module, ships it over SSH to the host, runs it with the host's Python, gets JSON back. Observe it for real with -vvv.
What Ansible Is and Why You Should Use It
Series opener: the configuration-management problem Ansible solves, why 'agentless' and 'idempotent' are the two most important keywords, the core concepts (control node, inventory, playbook, module, role), and the roadmap from basics to writing your own module.
Cron and Scheduled Tasks
Have commands and scripts run on a schedule — nightly backups, weekly log cleanup. Learn crontab syntax, the common pitfalls (PATH, environment), at for one-off jobs, and a wrap-up of the whole Linux series.