Practice Ansible: write & run real playbooks in your browser

What you'll practice

• Writing playbooks in real YAML — plays, tasks, handlers and variables.
• Targeting hosts and groups so one run fixes your whole fleet at once.
• Using modules to restart services, patch config, and clear failed states.
• Running a playbook against degraded nodes and confirming the fix before the SLA breaches.
• Choosing when to automate vs. when to SSH in and fix a one-off by hand.

A playbook you'll actually write

When the Chaos Engine knocks the web tier offline, hand-fixing each box is too slow. Instead you write something like this and push it to every web node at once:

- name: Recover the web tier
  hosts: web
  become: true
  tasks:
    - name: Ensure nginx is installed
      ansible.builtin.package:
        name: nginx
        state: present

    - name: Restart nginx and enable on boot
      ansible.builtin.service:
        name: nginx
        state: restarted
        enabled: true

Why a simulator beats a tutorial

Tutorials run in a tidy world where nothing fails. Real Ansible skill is about applying the right play under pressure while tickets pile up and morale drops. In the simulator the system breaks on its own — DNS failures, BGP flapping, rogue cryptominers — so every playbook you run is solving a problem that genuinely exists, the same way it works on a real on-call shift.

Keep going

Ansible is one tool on the deck. Use it to sharpen up for your SRE interview, pair it with Terraform provisioning, and see the full deck on the SysAdmin Simulator home page.