DO410 Automation with Ansible and Ansible Tower
Course description
Automation with Ansible and Ansible Tower
Automation with Ansible and Ansible Tower (DO410) teaches you how to develop standardized automation of the enterprise IT environment in order to improve operational efficiency. You will learn how to use Ansible for automation, configuration, provisioning, and management, as well as how to use Red Hat® Ansible Tower to centrally manage Ansible at an enterprise scale.
This course combines the content from Automation with Ansible (DO407) and Automation with Ansible II: Ansible Tower (DO409), and is based on Ansible 2.7 and Ansible Tower 3.3.
Through hands-on labs, you will learn to automate system administration tasks on managed hosts with Ansible, find out how to write Ansible playbooks to standardize task execution, and manage encryption for Ansible with Ansible Vault. This course will also teach you how to deploy and use Red Hat Ansible Tower to centrally manage existing Ansible projects, playbooks, and roles; perform basic maintenance and administration of the Ansible Tower installation; and configure users and teams and use them to control access to systems, projects, and other resources through role-based access controls. You will learn to use Ansible Tower's visual dashboard to launch, control, and monitor Ansible jobs; use the Ansible Tower application programming interface (API) to launch jobs from existing templates; automatically schedule Ansible jobs; and dynamically update host inventories.
The course material covered in this curriculum is now included within our newly released Red Hat System Administration III: Linux Automation with Ansible (RH294) and Advanced Automation: Ansible Best Practices (DO447) offerings. which cover how to use Red Hat Ansible Automation to automate across different functions. If you are interested in learning how to scale infrastructure efficiently, begin your journey with Linux automation today.
Course content summary
- Install and troubleshoot Ansible on central nodes and managed hosts.
- Automate administration tasks with Ansible playbooks and ad hoc commands.
- Write effective Ansible playbooks.
- Protect sensitive data used by tasks with Ansible Vault.
- Install and configure Ansible Tower for enterprise Ansible management.
- Use Ansible Tower to control access to inventories and machine credentials by users and teams.
- Create job templates in Ansible Tower to standardize playbook execution.
- Launch playbooks and monitor and review job results with Ansible Tower.
Audience for this course
This course is designed for professionals responsible for automation of configuration management, application deployment, provisioning and deployment of servers, and integration with DevOps CI/CD workflows, including these roles:
- Linux system administrators
- DevOps engineers
- Infrastructure automation engineers
- Systems design engineers
Prerequisites for this course
- Become a Red Hat Certified System Administrator, or demonstrate equivalent Red Hat Enterprise knowledge and experience
- Being a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) may be beneficial
Outline for this course
- Introduce Ansible
- Describe Ansible concepts and install Red Hat® Ansible Engine.
- Deploy Ansible
- Configure Ansible to manage hosts and run ad hoc Ansible commands.
- Implement playbooks
- Write a simple Ansible playbook and run it to automate tasks on multiple hosts.
- Manage variables and inclusions
- Write playbooks that use variables and facts to simplify management of the playbook and facts to reference information about the managed hosts.
- Implement task control
- Manage task control, handlers, and task errors in Ansible playbooks.
- Deploy files to managed hosts
- Deploy, manage, and adjust files on hosts managed by Ansible.
- Manage large projects
- Write playbooks that are optimized for larger, more complex projects.
- Simplify playbooks with roles
- Use Ansible roles to develop playbooks more quickly and to reuse Ansible code.
- Troubleshoot Ansible
- Troubleshoot playbooks and managed hosts.
- Install and access Ansible Tower
- Explain what Red Hat Ansible Tower is and demonstrate a basic ability to navigate and use its web UI.
- Assign access with users and teams
- Create user accounts and organize them into teams in Red Hat Ansible Tower, then assign them permissions to administer and access resources in the Ansible Tower service.
- Set up inventories and credentials
- Create inventories of machines to manage, and set up credentials necessary for Red Hat Ansible Tower to log in and run Ansible jobs on those systems.
- Manage projects and launch Ansible jobs
- Create projects and job templates in the web UI, using them to launch Ansible playbooks that are stored in Git repositories in order to automate tasks on managed hosts.
- Construct advanced job workflows
- Use additional features of job templates to improve performance, simplify customization of jobs, launch multiple jobs, schedule automatically recurring jobs, and provide notification of job results.
- Administer advanced inventories
- Manage inventories that are loaded from external files or generated dynamically from scripts or the Ansible Tower smart inventory feature.
- Perform maintenance and routine administration of Ansible Tower
- Execute routine maintenance and administration of Ansible Tower.
Impact on the organization
This course develops the skills needed to efficiently operate and more easily scale the organization's dynamic IT infrastructure, accelerate application time to value, and rapidly adapt and implement needed innovation through DevOps practices. Learning how to effectively use Red Hat Ansible Automation can help improve operational agility while ensuring necessary controls and consistency.
Red Hat has created this course in a way intended to benefit our customers, but each company and infrastructure is unique, and actual results or benefits may vary.
Impact on the individual
As a result of attending this course, you should be able to write Ansible playbooks and launch them to manage hosts and deploy applications in a scalable way. You should be able to implement an Ansible Tower installation and use it to centrally manage Ansible job execution, monitoring, and access to projects, inventories, and credentials.
You should be able to demonstrate these skills:
- Automate system administration tasks on managed hosts with Ansible.
- Write Ansible playbooks to standardize task execution.
- Deploy and perform basic maintenance and administration of an Ansible Tower installation.
- Control access to Ansible projects, credentials, and other resources through role-based access controls in Ansible Tower.