Advance Automation: Playbooks, Roles & Workflow Automation

Overview

Step into the next level of IT automation with Playbooks, Roles, and Workflow Automation — an intermediate course designed to help you scale Ansible automation with cleaner, reusable, and enterprise-ready workflows. Whether you’re a system administrator managing complex infrastructures or a DevOps professional streamlining deployments, this course takes you beyond the basics to build automation that is reliable, structured, and production-ready. Through practical examples, guided videos, and hands-on exercises, you’ll learn how to design and manage Ansible playbooks, implement roles, work with variables and templates, and manage multi-environment workflows. This course emphasizes real-world problem-solving to help you automate at scale with confidence and precision. By the end of this course, you will be able to: - Write and manage Ansible playbooks with tasks, handlers, and modular scripts. - Implement variables, templates, conditionals, and loops to create dynamic automation. - Organize automation using roles and manage environments with inventories. - Apply best practices for building scalable, maintainable, and idempotent workflows. This course is ideal for: - System administrators and IT engineers managing medium-to-large-scale infrastructures. - DevOps professionals looking to build reusable, team-friendly automation frameworks. - Cloud and infrastructure engineers deploying services across multiple environments. - Learners who have completed Foundations of Ansible Automation and want to deepen their expertise. Note: This is Course 2 of the specialization series. Basic knowledge of Ansible playbooks is recommended from Course 1, but no advanced experience is required. Disclaimer: This course is an independent educational resource developed by Board Infinity and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or officially associated with International Business Machines Corporation or any of its subsidiaries or affiliates. This course is not an official preparation material of International Business Machines Corporation. All trademarks, service marks, and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification purposes only.

Syllabus

Writing and Managing Playbooks

This module introduces learners to writing Ansible playbooks from scratch and managing playbook execution with tasks, handlers, and modular scripts. Learners will explore syntax, task flow, execution control, and common debugging practices essential for reliable automation.

Variables, Templates, and Logic Control

This module covers dynamic automation using variables, facts, and templates. Learners will also explore conditional logic, loops, and data manipulation using Jinja2 templating and YAML dictionaries.

Roles, Inventories, and Environments

This module explains how to structure large automation projects using roles and inventories. Learners will also explore environment-specific automation across dev, staging, and production systems.