Automation with Ansible I

Course overview

Through hands-on labs, students will learn to automate system administration tasks on managed hosts with Ansible, learn how to write Ansible playbooks to standardize task execution, centrally manage playbooks and schedule recurring execution through a web interface with Ansible Tower. Students will also learn to manage encryption for Ansible with Ansible Vault, deploy Ansible Tower and use it to manage systems, and use Ansible in a DevOps environment with Vagrant.

Course content summary

• Install and troubleshoot Ansible on central nodes and managed hosts
• Use Ansible to run ad-hoc commands and playbooks to automate tasks
• Write effective Ansible playbooks
• Protect encrypted data needed for tasks with Ansible Vault
• Use Ansible Tower to more easily manage enterprise Ansible deployments
• Work with Ansible in conjunction with Vagrant in a DevOps environment

Automation with Ansible II: Ansible Tower

Take your automation to the next level with Ansible Tower

Automation with Ansible II: Ansible Tower (DO409) is designed for IT professionals who use Ansible by Red Hat® and need to centrally manage their Ansible projects in a way that scales to large teams and complex enterprise installations using Ansible Tower by Red Hat.

This Ansible training is based on Ansible Tower 3, Ansible 2, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® 7.

Course overview

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.

Course summary

• 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

Outline for  Automation with Ansible I

Course introduction

Introduce and review the course.

Introduce Ansible

Describe the terminology and architecture of Ansible.

Deploy Ansible

Install Ansible and run ad hoc commands.

Implement playbooks

Write Ansible plays and execute a playbook.

Manage variables and inclusions

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

Implement task control

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

Implement Jinja2 templates

Implement a Jinja2 template.

Implement roles

Create and manage roles.

Configure complex playbooks

Configure connection types, delegations, and parallelism.

Implement Ansible Vault

Manage encryption with Ansible Vault.

Troubleshoot Ansible

Troubleshoot the Ansible control machine and managed nodes.

Implement Ansible Tower

Implement Ansible Tower.

Implement Ansible in a DevOps environment

Implement Ansible in a DevOps environment using Vagrant.

Comprehensive review

Review tasks from the Automation with Ansible course.

Automation with Ansible II: Ansible Tower

Course introduction

Introduce and review the course.

Install Ansible Tower by Red Hat and describe its architecture

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

Create users and teams for role-based access control

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 and manage inventories and credentials

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

Manage projects for provisioning with Ansible Tower

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.

Construct advanced job workflows

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.

Update inventories dynamically and compare inventory members

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.

Maintenance and administration of Ansible Tower

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

Comprehensive review of provisioning and managing systems using Ansible Tower

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.