Managing Enterprise Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Training Course

 Deployment of Ansible Automation Platform

• Functions of the platform gateway, automation controller, private automation hub, and the Event-Driven Ansible controller.
• The role of execution environments and automation mesh within the overall platform architecture.
• Deployment strategies and topologies for growth or enterprise scale, encompassing containerized, RPM-based, and OpenShift Operator methods.
• Preparation of the installer inventory and finalization of the setup based on the chosen deployment strategy.
• Initial access to the platform, subscription setup, and navigation of the consolidated user interface.

Oversight of Users and Access Rights

• Establishment of organizational units, teams, and user accounts.
• Comprehension of local accounts and centralized authentication mechanisms, including LDAP.
• Implementation of predefined roles, resource-specific permissions, and permission inheritance.
• Regulation of access to platform resources and content within the private automation hub.

Management of Inventories and Machine Credentials

• Creation of static inventories, including hosts, groups, and related variables.
• Setup of machine credentials using SSH keys, passwords, and privilege escalation configurations.
• Understanding of credential types and their application during job execution.
• Control over administrative and usage rights for inventories and credentials.
• Verification of connectivity to managed hosts via ad hoc commands.

Project Management and Job Initiation

• Linking projects to Git repositories and setting up source control credentials.
• Selection of branches and configuration of project updates, including behavior on launch.
• Utilization of execution environments and content sourced from the private automation hub.
• Creation of job templates and execution of playbooks against managed hosts.
• Analysis of job outputs, execution events, and the activity log.

Leveraging Advanced Job Template Capabilities

• Supplying job inputs via extra variables, launch prompts, and surveys.
• Configuration of host limits, fork counts, verbosity levels, job slicing, and fact caching.
• Scheduling of automation jobs.
• Setup of notifications for job initiation, completion, and failure events.

Development of Automation Workflows

• Construction of workflow job templates using the graphical workflow editor.
• Connection of jobs through success, failure, and always branches.
• Configuration of converging paths and recovery procedures for failed operations.
• Inclusion of approval nodes and management of approval timeouts.
• Initiation and scheduling of workflows, along with the setup of workflow notifications.

Administration of Advanced Inventories

• Importation of inventory data from projects maintained in Git.
• Integration of dynamic inventory sources via inventory plugins.
• Scheduling of inventory synchronization and refreshing sources prior to execution.
• Creation of constructed inventories by merging existing sources and filtering hosts using variables and patterns.

Automation of Platform Configuration

• Management of configuration as code via platform content collections, such as ansible.controller, ansible.platform, and ansible.hub.
• Use of REST APIs, authentication tokens, and API invocations from playbooks.
• Automation of the creation and configuration of organizations, projects, and job templates.
• Storage of configuration playbooks in Git and triggering automation via webhooks.

Platform Maintenance and Troubleshooting

• Oversight of services and identification of logs according to the selected deployment method.
• Diagnosis of frequent platform and job execution issues.
• Utilization of management jobs to maintain job history and activity stream data.
• Planning and execution of backup and restoration procedures.
• Review of upgrade considerations and subscription management.

Expansion of Deployments via Automation Mesh

• Understanding of control, execution, and hop node roles, including hybrid node behavior where relevant to the deployment model.
• Connection of nodes via Receptor and design of mesh routes for remote or segmented network environments.
• Management of instance groups, container groups, and execution capacity.
• Application of high-availability principles to platform components, databases, and load balancing.
• Evaluation of the impact of node or service failures on automation execution and recovery.

Comprehensive Platform Administration Assessment

• Configuration of private automation hub content based on a provided specification.
• Setup of an organization including users, teams, inventories, credentials, and Git projects.
• Creation of job templates and workflows to satisfy specified operational requirements.
• Verification of access permissions, content availability, and automation execution across the configured environment.