Ansible introduction for RHEL8/CentOS8: Ansible Primer for Linux Administrators

This training workbook is a comprehensive introduction to Ansible automation, suitable for CentOS 8.3 and RHEL 8.3.
This will give anyone a head start towards the RHCE certification, or indeed those who do not wish to become RHCE certified but would still like to understand the essentials of Ansible deployment and use.

The book covers the following topics:

• Installing the ansible software packages on RHEL and CentOS
• Preparing the ansible control node
• configuring ansible clients (SSH, Python, sudo, etc.) and testing access
• Ansible inventories of hosts and host groups
• running ad-hoc commands
• Ansible modules, for example ping, copy, yum, service, command, and others
• Creating and running Ansible playbooks, utilising variables, facts and debug.
• Using roles, in particular RedHat roles, for example network configuration and time server configuration.
• Accessing ansible documents for modules and roles.
• Overview of Ansible Tower

The notes also provide guidance for lab environment setup, plus how to obtain a free RHEL8 subscription.
All example playbooks are freely downloadable from our Github storage.
This book is a forerunner for a complete RHCE training workbook which will e published around May 2021.