I’ve been quite successful with the Ansible trainings over the past couple of years. What originally started out as a “can you do this for us, our trainer abandoned it” project, has attracted quite a large number of trainees. Thank you, it’s been fun.

It’s also time to add a bit more content, and as such we’ve been developing what I fondly call “Part Two”. After procrastinating thinking about this course for a couple of months, I’ve spent a week researching and writing. (Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know how I’ve been loving using office “productivity” software, but there’s a reason for having had to use that.)

The current syllabus reads as follows:

• Dynamic inventory
• Fact caching
• Jinja2 filters
• More Templating
• Custom-made Lookup Plugins, e.g. the airport thing
• Custom Ansible modules
• Collections
• A [maybe not so] brief look at callback plugins

That’s quite a bit of material which has to be crammed into people in two days, and it’s possible we’ll have to either shrink the syllabus or prolong the traning. The new material and the labs fit well into my existing FreeBSD training setup so part that didn’t require a lot of effort.

Research on these topics has been fun. A lot I knew, but there’s also a lot of new stuff or things which have changed since I last had a deep look at them. For example, lookup plugins can have options only if their documentation specifies so – this is a very good thing, and is going to make for better-quality code.

Another topic I’ve finally had the opportunity to dive into are Collections, and there’s a lot to be said for them. And yes, I have in the past mainly been complaining about the thought-changes they bring about; I will henceforth stop doing that.

I’m very much looking forward to giving the first scheduled training in a fortnight.