Red Hat Ansible Automation & Tower (DO410)

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 2.3 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.

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.

Ansible Tower Course Outline

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

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