Advanced Automation: Ansible Best Practices

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.