September 24, 2026
Ansible Engine Setup Introduction
This video introduces Ansible as an automation tool — why its simple, human-readable YAML playbooks make it accessible across teams, and how its agentless, SSH-based architecture lets it manage systems without installing anything on them. You'll learn the core building blocks (inventory, modules, plugins, and the CLI) and how they work together in a typical automation run. In this next lab, you'll set up your Ansible development environment on an Ubuntu jump host, then write and run your first playbook to automatically back up configurations across simulated Cisco IOS-XE and NX-OS routers.
Ansible excels at the automation of repetitive tasks and can orchestrate complex workflows across many systems. This makes Ansible an ideal solution for managing your infrastructure as code. Really, Ansible can be used to automate the full life cycle of the infrastructure. At the simplest level, the Ansible architecture really consists of the control node or nodes, which are the computers running the Ansible software, and the managed nodes, which are all the devices in your infrastructure that you're looking to automate using Ansible. Those managed nodes are what you would add into your inventory and feed into the control node with your playbook. And playbook is where you define what you wanna automate, and the inventory is where you define where you wanna automate.