In today's complex and fast-paced IT landscape, the need for automation has never been greater. Organizations of all sizes are looking for solutions that can streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, and reduce errors. Ansible stands out as a powerful automation tool, hitting the mark on several key points that make it an ideal choice for teams of all backgrounds and expertise levels. Its human-readable YAML playbooks mean automation isn't locked behind a wall of scripting expertise — system administrators, developers, and network engineers can all read the same playbook and understand exactly what it does. Because Ansible is agent-less, communicating over standard SSH rather than requiring software installed on every managed device, it drops cleanly into almost any environment, from cloud infrastructure to the network gear already running in your data center. And with a vast library of pre-built modules covering everything from web servers to routers and switches, teams spend less time reinventing automation from scratch and more time putting it to work. This learning path will take you from these core concepts through hands-on labs building real automation against live network devices, giving you the foundation to bring this same approach back to your own infrastructure.

This learning path takes you from Linux fundamentals to confident system administration. You'll learn how Linux is structured, master the command line, and manage users, permissions, processes, and storage. You'll also harden systems against attacks and automate routine work with shell scripts, building the core skills every entry-level engineer needs to run Linux systems.

Go beyond the basics: build robust shell automation, troubleshoot networks methodically, shape services with systemd, and manage storage and SELinux on real production Linux systems.

This Learning Path shows you how to build a source-of-truth-driven automation solution with Cisco Catalyst Center, NetBox, and Ansible. You'll sync live inventory into NetBox using Orb Agent and Diode, drive Ansible playbooks off a NetBox dynamic inventory, and close the loop by writing live device health scores back into NetBox.

Learn how Linux organizes everything into one tree, where the system keeps what, and how ownership and permissions decide who can use each file, all in a live Ubuntu terminal.

AI can draft a playbook in seconds, but you still have to trust it before it touches production. This hands-on learning path shows how to connect an AI agent to the Ansible Dev Tools MCP server and use it to scaffold, lint, and test automation against real quality gates, then publish only validated content as a trusted AAP job template.