As discussed tonight I’ve am hoping to simplify my VM / container setup and maintenance using ansible. Ansible looks good but there is a learning curve.
Jeff Geerling has done a good job of going through the various Ansible “learning tasks” (as they used to say at Uni). It’s a few years old now but his Ansible 101 series covers the basics, remote setups, testing and CI/CD. He has written a book that complements the series. I have bought it but it is also available on line in text format. (You probably just need a good markdown renderer to improve readability.)
Jeff is constantly revising the book so it is never too far out of date. He has made a number of the examples from the book available in his github repository. It’s always nice to actually get something working on your own system.
Another useful resource is David McKone’s Ansible series. I haven’t gone through them all yet but I had a go at automating VM creation in proxmox using ansible, but failed near the end. There is no git repository for this project but you can get the code from the documentation on his techtutorials website.