Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Training Course

1 Developing playbooks with Ansible Automation Platform

• The functions of the automation controller, automation hub, platform gateway, and execution environments.
• Setting up developer tools, including Git, the Ansible extension for VS Code, and ansible-lint.
• Executing playbooks using ansible-navigator in both interactive and stdout modes.
• Managing project files within Git through branching, committing, pushing, and pulling.
• Structuring playbooks, roles, and projects to enhance readability, reusability, and maintainability.

2 Utilizing content collections and execution environments

• Collection namespaces, fully qualified collection names, and content dependencies.
• Discovering collections within Red Hat automation hub, private automation hub, and Ansible Galaxy.
• Installing necessary collections using ansible-galaxy and requirements files.
• Choosing an execution environment and examining its included tools and collections.
• Understanding collection availability within execution environments and via project content paths.

3 Executing playbooks through the automation controller

• Utilizing the unified platform interface to manage and initiate automation tasks.
• Understanding the interconnections between organisations, projects, inventories, credentials, and job templates.
• Linking Git-based automation projects and selecting the appropriate execution environments.
• Initiating jobs and analyzing output, status, and execution errors.

4 Configuring Ansible and the automation content navigator

• How Ansible identifies configuration files and applies environment variable overrides.
• Reviewing effective settings using ansible-config and ansible-navigator config.
• Configuring execution environment images, pull behaviors, execution modes, and logging in ansible-navigator.yml.
• Diagnosing configuration discrepancies that impact playbook development and execution.

5 Managing inventories and inventory variables

• Creating YAML inventories and migrating existing INI inventory structures.
• Organizing host and group variables within host_vars and group_vars directories.
• Utilizing host aliases and connection variables such as ansible_host, ansible_user, and ansible_connection.
• Generating inventory data using dynamic inventory plug-ins.
• Integrating multiple inventory sources and verifying the resulting hosts, groups, and variables.

6 Regulating and optimizing task execution

• Managing privilege escalation using become at appropriate playbook levels.
• Understanding the execution sequence across pre_tasks, roles, tasks, handlers, and post_tasks.
• Controlling handlers via notify, listen, and meta: flush_handlers.
• Selecting specific tasks using tags, including the special always and never tags.
• Assessing performance through fact-gathering settings, caching, forks, SSH pipelining, and callback plug-ins.

7 Transforming data using filters and plug-ins

• Applying Jinja2 filters to strings, lists, dictionaries, defaults, and data types.
• Retrieving external data using lookup plug-ins and query.
• Processing structured data using loops, subelements, dict2items, product, and loop_control.
• Handling network-address data through ansible.utils.ipaddr filters.
• Formatting variables to meet the requirements of reusable roles and templates.

8 Orchestrating rolling updates

• Delegating tasks and facts using delegate_to and delegate_facts, including local actions.
• Regulating parallel execution and host batches using forks and serial.
• Using max_fail_percentage and any_errors_fatal to manage failure responses.
• Understanding the behavior of run_once during batched update operations.
• Coordinating host removal from and re-entry to a load balancer to minimize disruption during updates.

9 Creating collections and custom execution environments

• Organizing collection content, including roles, modules, plug-ins, and supporting metadata.
• Defining collection metadata and compatibility details in galaxy.yml and meta/runtime.yml.
• Building collection packages and publishing them to a private automation hub.
• Defining dependencies in execution-environment.yml and building images with ansible-builder.
• Validating custom environments with ansible-navigator and integrating them with the automation controller.