Study the material in this book to prepare for the RHCE exam EX294 and to learn how using Ansible within your own environment improves system administration productivity.
This book covers all of the objectives of the exam and extends further, ensuring that you know how to use Ansible to manage Linux. The book uses CentOS, a Red Hat-based distribution, and Ubuntu instead of using a single Red Hat distribution. By using the two distributions, you will understand the power of Ansible and how easily you can deal with multiple platforms, which is crucial for your understanding of Ansible in the real world.
The book assumes no previous knowledge of Ansible but some knowledge of Linux system administration from the command line. You will learn how to manage Linux systems that are installed with different distributions, including CentOS Enterprise Linux 8 and Ubuntu 18.04. You will be able to manage these systems using ad hoc commands from the command line as well as creating Ansible playbooks that can be replayed reliably many times. To save on the code that you have to create, you will learn how to use Ansible Galaxy to search for and download roles and collections that are pre-written to manage elements of your Linux installations. By the end of this book, you will be able to write efficient and effective YAML playbooks to manage your entire estate.
You will:
Prepare systems so that password-less access can be used with Ansible remotelyUse ad hoc commands to quickly configure systemsUse and format YAML files correctlyCreate playbooks that grow in their complexity as your experience developsEnsure that services are restarted on configuration changes
