Inventories and the control node
Setting up a control node, preparing managed hosts, static and dynamic inventories, groups and group variables, and understanding configuration precedence well enough to debug it.
Red Hat Ansible automation training.
This is the Ansible course for people with infrastructure to automate and no exam to sit. It is the automation half of the RHCE syllabus, taken at its own pace and pointed at your environment rather than at a task list — shorter than RHCE, and with no RHCSA prerequisite.
Vendor: Red HatLevel: Beginner–IntermediateWorkload: ~24 hrsLabs: Hands-on
Syllabus
What the course covers
Organised by Red Hat's own objective domains, so what you study maps onto what you are assessed on.
Playbooks that are safe to re-run
Task structure, modules against shell commands, variables and facts, loops and conditionals, handlers, and idempotence as a design goal rather than an accident.
Roles and reuse
Writing roles, the role directory layout and why it is shaped that way, defaults against vars, dependencies, and consuming community and certified collections without inheriting their problems.
Templating and file management
Jinja2 templates, filters, generating configuration that differs per host or per environment, and managing files whose content is derived rather than fixed.
Secrets and sensitive data
Ansible Vault, encrypting variables against encrypting whole files, keeping secrets out of logs and out of version control, and integrating vault passwords into an automated run.
Patterns at scale
Structuring a repository multiple teams can work in, tags and limits for surgical runs, check mode and diff before you commit to a change, rolling updates across a fleet, and error handling that fails a run rather than half-applying it.
How it runs
Labs, prerequisites & the exam
In the labs
Where the hours actually go. Each of these is done, not watched.
- Bring an unmanaged set of hosts under Ansible from nothing: access, inventory, and a first playbook.
- Take a manual runbook and convert it, then prove idempotence by running it twice.
- Refactor into roles and pull one dependency from a collection.
- Template a per-environment configuration from group variables and trigger a service restart through a handler.
- Encrypt credentials with Vault and consume them in an automated run.
- Perform a rolling change across a fleet with check mode first, then a limited run, then the full one.
Who it's for
- System and platform engineers with more hosts than time
- Teams standardising configuration that currently lives in people's heads
- Developers who want repeatable environments without becoming administrators
- RHCE candidates who want the automation material before committing to the exam
Before you start
- Comfortable on a Linux command line
- Able to edit files in a terminal editor and read YAML
- Some idea of what you would like to automate — the labs work better against a real problem
- No RHCSA and no prior Ansible experience required
Certification
No exam. This is a skills course.
There is no certification attached to this track. If a credential is the goal, the RHCE course covers this material against the EX294 exam objectives and adds the exam-shaped practice — this course is the same automation content without the exam constraints, and without the RHCSA prerequisite.
FAQ
Questions about Ansible automation
How is this different from the RHCE course?
The material overlaps heavily, but this course has no exam to serve. It is shorter, spends its time on patterns for real environments rather than exam-shaped tasks, and has no RHCSA prerequisite. Take RHCE if you want the credential; take this if you want the capability.
Do I need a Red Hat subscription to follow along?
No. The labs run on provisioned environments. Ansible itself is not tied to RHEL, and the patterns taught here apply to any Linux fleet you manage.
Can this be run against our own infrastructure?
Yes, when delivered onsite or as a private cohort. Working against your own inventory is usually where the course earns its keep, because the interesting problems are always the ones specific to an environment.
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Enroll in Ansible automation
Tell us your starting point and your timeline. We'll tell you honestly whether this is the right track, and hold you a seat if it is.