Getting Started with Ansible

The first part of the book lays the groundwork for everything that follows by introducing Ansible as a powerful and flexible automation tool, not just for networking but for infrastructure and systems in general.

You’ll start by understanding what makes Ansible different, how it fits into modern automation workflows, and why its simplicity, readability, and agentless architecture have made it a widely adopted solution across IT teams.

We will then dive into the core building blocks of Ansible: inventories, variables, playbooks, templates, and Ansible Vault for secrets management. You’ll also learn about key concepts such as conditionals, loops, and Jinja2 templating, which are critical tools for building dynamic, reusable automation.

Finally, we will explore more advanced features that enable production-grade usage: roles and collections for modularity, execution strategies for performance, and techniques for extending Ansible with custom filters and plugins.

Whether you’re new to Ansible or looking to reinforce your fundamentals, this part provides the essential skills and understanding needed to confidently automate complex environments before applying those skills to real-world network automation in the chapters ahead.

This part of the book includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Why Ansible for Network Automation?
• Chapter 2, Building Blocks of Ansible
• Chapter 3, Advanced Ansible Concepts