Configuration Management & IaC

Covers Lesson 1

Checks that you can place each tool by agent model and direction, say what idempotency and configuration drift actually mean, and tell an Ansible file from a Terraform one on sight.

Topics covered

• Configuration drift and idempotency
• Declarative versus imperative change
• Agentless versus agent-based, push versus pull
• Ansible inventory, playbooks, modules, and templates
• Terraform's state file and plan-then-apply
• Recognising YAML and HCL

Every question here is answerable from the first-party notes of the lessons above. You commit to an answer before you see whether it was right.

This quiz is a Week 10 milestone in its own right. Passing it does not change the completion state of any individual lesson, and you do not need it to finish the lessons it covers.

Section quiz

Configuration Management & IaC

8 questions covering Lesson 1. Answer each one before you see whether you were right.

Question 1 of 8

1. You are about to manage fifty Cisco routers with Ansible. What software must be installed on each router first?

2. Which statement correctly places Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, and Chef by agent model and direction?

3. A playbook that sets an NTP server ran successfully last night and is scheduled to run again tonight. On a device that is already correct, what should tonight's run do, and what is that property called?

4. Which of these is a declarative definition of a change rather than an imperative one?

5. What is configuration drift, and what makes it dangerous?

6. One reviewed Ansible source file has to produce forty individually correct device configurations. Which two constructs make that possible?

7. Terraform keeps something Ansible does not. What is it, and what does it let Terraform do?

8. You are shown a file containing resource "example_network" "campus" { cidr = "10.10.0.0/16" }. Which tool is it for, and what gives it away?

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