Long story short: I’m launching Ansible for Networking Engineers self-paced course today. It’s already online and you can start whenever you wish.

Now for the details…

Isn’t there already an Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar? Yes.

So what’s the difference? Glad you asked ;)

Major differences

The biggest difference between the two is the student experience. Watching a webinar is like reading a book – you download the videos, you watch them, you answer the review questions (or not).

Self-paced online course includes continuous guidance (this is what you should do next and that’s why you should do it), online forum (Slack team already used by students of network automation course), and support, so it’s more like attending a real training with someone prompting you to get the job done.

Speaking about differences, the major differences between Ansible for Networking Engineers and Building Network Automation Solution online courses are:

• Focus: Ansible course gets you fluent in Ansible, Network Automation course helps you build full-blown solutions and covers topics like system architecture, version control, testing and continuous integration.
• The Network Automation course includes live sessions and guest speakers, combining the best experiences of attending a real training and an awesome vendor-neutral conference (Troopers is the only one that comes to mind… I don’t think there’s anything getting close to it now that Interop is fading back into its previous self).

Some more details

The materials describing the intricacies of Ansible, networking modules, YAML and Jinja2 are mostly the same in webinar and online course, and whenever I’ll add new material it will be added to both and thus also available to subscribers. The online course also includes material from other network automation webinars.

Both webinar and online course have review questions and hands-on exercises. The online course will eventually have detailed solutions as well.

The webinar already includes a case study (creating DMVPN configurations from a YAML data model). The online course will have numerous case studies (including detailed explanations on why they’re done the way they are) and homework assignments.

You can enroll into the online course now, and start with the first section in minutes. I’ll keep adding material to it, and expect to have it completed in September - that’s why you can get it at enthusiast price till September 1st.

Finally, active subscribers can upgrade to the online course and save $200.