My new years commitment for 2018…to write about the things I learn so others can learn too.

I recently needed to configure a Red Hat Linux machine with Jenkins, GIT, Maven, Java and Docker to run Selenium WebDriver tests. This was quite a tough experience as I’ve never really used a Unix-like operating system to this extent before. I spent most of my time googling for commands to run and although I got there in the end, I haven’t got a clue how to reproduce the exact environment if I needed to.

This was the pinnacle point where I realised that I really needed to skill-up and learn more about the Unix-like ecosystem.

After speaking to a few friends who work in the Devops team, I thought I would start learning about Ansible to replicate the environment mentioned above. Ansible is an open-source tool which helps automate configuration management, provisions software and even deploy applications.

I just wanted to make this first post as an introduction, in the next post we will start looking at installing Ansible.