Introduce and review the course.

Describe the terminology and architecture of Ansible.

Install Ansible and run ad hoc commands.

Write Ansible plays and execute a playbook.

Describe variable scope and precedence, manage variables and facts in a play, and manage inclusions.

Manage task control, handlers, and tags in Ansible playbooks.

Implement a Jinja2 template.

Create and manage roles.

Configure connection types, delegations, and parallelism

Manage encryption with Ansible Vault.

Troubleshoot the Ansible control machine and managed nodes

Implement Ansible Tower.

Implement Ansible in a DevOps environment using Vagrant.

Review tasks from the Automation with Ansible course.

Course introduction

Introduce and review the course.

This course will teach students how to deploy and use Ansible Tower by Red Hat to manage their 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. Students will also learn to use the visual dashboard to centrally launch, control, and monitor Ansible jobs, use the Ansible Tower application programming interface (API) to launch jobs from existing templates, and automatically schedule Ansible jobs and update the host inventory.

Install Ansible Tower by Red Hat

Configure users and teams to access Ansible Tower resources using role-based access controls

Use Ansible Tower to manage shared access to inventories and machine credentials

Create job templates and workflow job templates to standardize playbook execution

Launch playbooks and monitor and review job results using Ansible Tower

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

Create user accounts and organize them into teams that can be used in conjunction with role-based access control to manage administration and access to organization resources in Ansible Tower

Create inventories of machines to manage and set up credentials that will allow Ansible Tower to run jobs on those systems

Create basic projects and job templates in Ansible Tower that can be used to run Ansible playbooks in order to provision and configure managed systems.

Use additional features of job templates to improve workflows by creating simple job launch forms, templates to launch multiple jobs in sequence, and to report job success or failure through external notification systems.

Use advanced techniques to work with inventories, including dynamic generation of inventories from centralized information sources and monitoring of hosts in an inventory for configuration deviations or differences.

Demonstrate skills learned in this course by using a provided specification to configure and operate a new organization in Ansible Tower with certain users and teams, an inventory of hosts to manage, and an Ansible project containing playbooks and other supporting files.

Perform routine maintenance and administration on Ansible Tower and get a basic familiarity with the command line tools and Ansible Tower API.

• Access the command line
• Manage files from command line
• Create, view, and edit text files
• Manage local users and groups
• Monitor and manage Linux processes
• Control services and daemons

• Control access to files with file system permissions
• Analyze and store log files
• Configure and secure the OpenSSH service
• Install and update software packages
• Access Linux file systems
• Manage Linux networking

Improve command line productivity
Run commands more efficiently by using advanced features of the bash shell, shell scripts, and various utilities provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Schedule future tasks
Schedule commands to run in the future, either one time or on a repeating schedule.
Tune system performance
Improve system performance by setting tuning parameters and adjusting scheduling priority of processes.
Control access to files with ACLs
Interpret and set access control lists (ACLs) on files to handle situations requiring complex user and group access permissions.
Manage SELinux security
Protect and manage the security of a server by using SELinux.

This course is geared toward Windows system administrators, network administrators, and other system administrators who are interested in supplementing current skills or backstopping other team members, in addition to Linux system administrators who are responsible for these tasks:

Configuring, installing, upgrading, and maintaining Linux systems using established standards and procedures
Providing operational support
Managing systems for monitoring system performance and availability
Writing and deploying scripts for task automation and system administration