Ansible - Bite sized learning

As the pandemic eases and we are getting back to more face-to-face engagement, one of the asks we have been hearing repeatedly is to have more hands-on sessions. Our customers and partners are getting tired of presentation-style engagement and want something they can get their hands dirty with and explore as a group. This drives us to look at various options available and eventually results in the series of Ansible hands-on workshops being delivered in Singapore. This blog explains the thought process and how we put the workshop together.?

The challenges with hands-on sessions are? :

• Require a number of pre-requisite skills?
• Often to illustrate some concepts, there are heavy-liftings you need to do to install/configure the system before you get to the interesting bits.

As a result it is often difficult to incorporate it as a general event for a mixed audience.What we are looking for is an easy way to illustrate some key concepts and provide an environment where participants can explore at their own pace. So we started to look at an easier way to run workshops for Ansible. A lot of them might not have any experience with it at all and are not command-line gurus.?

We structured a ? day workshop using the self-paced labs at?

https://www.ansible.com/products/ansible-training

and run it for our partners and customers on 23rd September 2022.? We started the workshop with an introduction to the technology, i.e. Ansible and how it is being used by other customers. We have 3 labs and content to explain the concepts behind it and trainers to walk our participants through. Each lab is only about 45 mins with a short introduction to provide the context on what we are trying to achieve, the actual hands-on and then a wrap up on the learning. We also explain the difference between Enterprise and Community.?

Most of the participants had no prior knowledge of Ansible. However, they are able to follow along, write their first playbook, explore CI/CD with Ansible and set it up using OpenShift Operator by the end of the workshop. It was quite an amazing experience and both the participants and the trainers had a lot of fun in the worksop. Since the environment is open to anyone even outside the workshop environment, the participants continue to explore and submit additional labs exercises after the workshop.

Due to the overwhelming response and the positive feedback, we are planning to run more sessions and perhaps for customers outside of Singapore as well. Meanwhile, if you are keen to explore the labs. It’s available here: https://www.ansible.com/products/ansible-training. Do give it a try!