Advanced Automation: Red Hat Ansible Best Practices (DO447)

Take your Red Hat Ansible Automation skills to the next level and manage automation at scale

Advanced Automation: Red Hat Ansible Best Practices (DO447) is for experienced Red Hat® Ansible® Automation users who want to take their Ansible skills to the next level, enabling scalable design and operation of Ansible Automation in the enterprise. You will explore better ways to automate tasks and use Red Hat Ansible Engine effectively, as well as how to leverage advanced features of Ansible to perform more complex tasks. You will also learn how to install and use Red Hat Ansible Tower to centrally coordinate your use of Ansible, control access to hosts and systems, and manage Ansible workflows through the web interface and the Red Hat Ansible Tower API.

This course is based on Red Hat Ansible Automation (Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 / Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.5) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 8.

Course content summary 

• Investigate recommended practices for effective and efficient automation with Ansible.

• Perform rolling updates with your Ansible Automation operations.

• Use advanced features of Ansible to work with data, including filters and plugins.

• Control applications through their REST API with Ansible Playbooks.

• Implement Red Hat Ansible Tower to centrally coordinate and scale Red Hat Ansible Automation.

• Leverage capabilities of Red Hat Ansible Tower to manage complex automation workflows.

• Implement a CI/CD pipeline for your automation with Git and Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Develop with recommended practices
  Demonstrate and implement recommended practices for effective and efficient use of Ansible for automation.

Manage inventories
  Use advanced features of Ansible to manage inventories.

Manage task execution
  Control and optimize the execution of tasks by Ansible Playbooks.

Transform data with filters and plugins
  Populate, manipulate, and manage data in variables using filters and plugins.

Coordinate rolling updates
  Minimize downtime and ensure maintainability and simplicity of Ansible Playbooks by using the advanced features of Ansible to manage rolling updates.

Install and access Red Hat Ansible Tower
  Explain what Red Hat Ansible Tower is and demonstrate a basic ability to navigate and use its web user interface.

Manage access with users and teams
  Create user accounts and organize them into teams in Red Hat Ansible Tower, then assign the users and teams permissions to administer and access resources in the Ansible Tower service.

Manage inventories and credentials
  Create inventories of machines to manage, then configure credentials necessary for Red Hat Ansible Tower to log in and run Ansible jobs on those systems.

Manage projects and launching Ansible jobs
  Create projects and job templates in the web UI, using these tools to launch Ansible Playbooks that are stored in Git repositories in order to automate tasks on managed hosts.

Construct advanced job workflows
  Use advanced features of job templates to improve performance, simplify customization of jobs, launch multiple jobs, schedule automatically recurring jobs, and provide notification of job results.

Communicate with APIs using Ansible
  Interact with REST APIs with Ansible Playbooks and control Red Hat Ansible Tower using its REST API.

Manage advanced inventories
  Administer inventories that are loaded from external files or generated dynamically from scripts or the Ansible Tower smart inventory feature.

Create a simple CI/CD pipeline with Ansible Tower
  Build and operate a proof-of-concept CI/CD pipeline based on Ansible Automation and integrating Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Maintain Ansible Tower
  Perform routine maintenance and administration of Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Perform a comprehensive review
 Demonstrate skills learned in this course by configuring and operating a new organization in Ansible Tower using a provided specification, Ansible projects, and hosts to be provisioned and managed.

Note: Course outline is subject to change with technology advances and as the nature of the underlying job evolves. For questions or confirmation on a specific objective or topic, contact one of our Red Hatters.

Audience for this course

This course is designed for users who need to set recommended design patterns and operate automation practices at scale, including these roles:

• DevOps engineers
• Linux system administrators, developers
• Release engineers
• Other IT professionals with basic expertise using Ansible or Red Hat Ansible Engine to automate, provision, configure, and deploy applications and services in a Linux environment

Prerequisites for this course

• Be a Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA®), or demonstrate equivalent Red Hat Enterprise Linux knowledge and experience
• Be a Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Automation or Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE®) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, or demonstrate equivalent Ansible experience