Developing Advanced Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Training Course

1 Developing Playbooks with Ansible Automation Platform

• Understanding the functions of automation controller, automation hub, platform gateway, and execution environments.
• Setting up development tools, such as Git, the Ansible extension for VS Code, and ansible-lint.
• Executing playbooks using ansible-navigator in both interactive and standard output modes.
• Managing project files in Git through branches, commits, pushes, and pulls.
• Organizing playbooks, roles, and projects to enhance readability, reusability, and maintainability.

2 Utilizing Content Collections and Execution Environments

• Exploring collection namespaces, fully qualified collection names, and content dependencies.
• Locating collections in Red Hat automation hub, private automation hub, and Ansible Galaxy.
• Installing necessary collections via ansible-galaxy and requirements files.
• Choosing an execution environment and examining the tools and collections it includes.
• Comprehending collection availability within execution environments and through project content paths.

3 Executing Playbooks via Automation Controller

• Using the unified platform interface to manage and initiate automation tasks.
• Understanding the interdependencies among organisations, projects, inventories, credentials, and job templates.
• Linking Git-based automation projects and selecting the appropriate execution environments.
• Starting jobs and interpreting output, status codes, and execution errors.

4 Configuring Ansible and Automation Content Navigator

• How Ansible identifies configuration files and applies environment variable overrides.
• Reviewing active settings using ansible-config and ansible-navigator config.
• Setting execution environment images, pull behavior, execution mode, and logging in ansible-navigator.yml.
• Identifying configuration discrepancies that impact playbook development and execution.

5 Managing Inventories and Inventory Variables

• Creating YAML inventories and migrating existing INI inventory structures.
• Structuring host and group variables within host_vars and group_vars directories.
• Utilizing host aliases and connection variables like ansible_host, ansible_user, and ansible_connection.
• Generating inventory data via dynamic inventory plug-ins.
• Merging inventory sources and verifying the resulting hosts, groups, and variables.

6 Controlling 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.
• Managing handlers using notify, listen, and meta: flush_handlers.
• Selecting tasks via tags, including the special always and never tags.
• Optimizing performance using fact-gathering settings, caching, forks, SSH pipelining, and callback plug-ins.

7 Transforming Data with Filters and Plug-ins

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

8 Coordinating Rolling Updates

• Delegating tasks and facts using delegate_to and delegate_facts, including local actions.
• Managing 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 when updates are executed in batches.
• Coordinating host removal and reintegration into 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 distributing them to private automation hubs.
• Specifying dependencies in execution-environment.yml and building images with ansible-builder.
• Validating custom environments with ansible-navigator and integrating them with automation controller.