Setup Your Own Ansible/Docker Workshop/Raising An Ansible Army

[arnabsinha4u]

Ansible is easy to learn but learn by doing!

For individuals/enterprises, learning is an investment which involves, infrastructure, material, setup and effort.

I created an Ansible Training Lab to train a huge workforce using Ansible & Docker.

From bootstrapping a machine to setup of the complete lab takes ~ 1 minute. The lab is scalable on the fly, leverages the idempotency feature of Ansible as its best. Every student has his/her own sandbox and extreme LEAN Infra usage. A plethora of tags in the lab setup playbook brings various functionalities at your finger tips, like SSH Key refresh, dynamic scale-up/scale-down of control and managed nodes for the students, private network setup, scale-up/scale-down of participants and many more…

This lab is being used in many individuals and large enterprises. Workshops and talks at scale have been organized at Ansible Meetup's, DevOps Days and conferences with a high success rate.

[arnabsinha4u]

Dear Team,

Can you please check the build error in travis. Its mainly due to Travis: $ curl -sSL "https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xCE3F3DE92099F7A4" | sudo -E apt-key add - gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.

Request you to retrigger the same and mdl check would pass. I have tested the same locally with the mdlrc provided by you.

If you want me to do a empty commit, thats also possible, but let me know.

Thanks and Regards, Arnab

[tima]

Thanks for your the effort and submitting it to Lightbulb here. Before we could accept this we'd need to do a fair bit of work with you to make the changes and additions to get this to fit the format and contribution requirements necessary. Admittedly all of the specifics of that are not as explicitly documented as they should be -- you have to infer that from looking at what's been done and ask questions. Here are some starting points though:

• Contributors Guide
• Lightbulb Project Philosophy
• The Lightbulb Facilitator's Guide

For instance, we'd like to see the same file organization as the current content, a slide deck in reveal.js format with speaking notes and hands on workshop assignments with a solutions guide in addition to cleaning up the examples to adhere to Ansible best practices -- native YAML format, minimizing the use of shell scripts and command modules in favor of task specific modules etc.

[liquidat]

@arnabsinha4u , few questions here:

• This PR mostly consists of the code to bring such an environment up, right? So it is more about the environment that is created than about training and class content, am I right?
• Where do the containers actually run? Given a class of 15 people, are those containers hosted on whatever someone provides locally? Or are they hosted by default on AWS?

In general, it might be worth an evaluation if this could become another provisioner, next to the AWS one, to host the training environment.

[arnabsinha4u]

@liquidat

1) Yes, you are right. The PR is the code to bring up an ideal environment for learning Ansible using Ansible and Docker. I also have a course which I will open source soon.

2) This setup can be created on any infra like, Vagrant, VM, Laptops, AWS etc. So a trainer can host his environment or can ask the students to create their own environment on laptops. By default this is not hosted anywhere.

[liquidat]

@arnabsinha4u Thanks for the answer. So indeed it sounds to me that we should try to add this as a second provider: so that people could choose to either deploy directly on AWS (like it is the case right now) or in containers via your method - but use the same content afterwards (decks, workshops, guides, etc.). My recommendation is to submit this as a second provider. What do you think, @tima ?

[dfederlein]

@liquidat I concur: this should be a separate provisioner.

[arnabsinha4u]

@liquidat @tima can you please let me know the next steps in terms of what shall I do now so that this can be merged in the repo? Changes needed etc? I will make them accordingly.

[dfederlein]

Hi,

We won't be merging this, as the function of Lightbulb wasn't to get into the business of dictating how a workshop was run, and we're actually removing provisioners entirely and focusing on content only (ie: presentations, speaker notes and lab content with spec sheets saying how to run said lab.)

In the future you will see the contributor guide change for this repo and more tightly define the purpose and requirements for contributions for lightbulb content.

Thanks for your work.