Andrew Mallett - Ansible Automation for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Exam (EX294)

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For many years the RHCE from Red Hat has been based on managing services on a single Red Hat host. The big question is: how many RHCEs manage just a single host? With that in mind, Red Hat has updated the exam and training to support Ansible, allowing you to learn to manage many hosts.

Ansible is a configuration management system that is now owned by Red Hat Inc. Using Ansible, you can manage many systems as easily as you can manage a single system. Using this book, Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) Study Guide: Ansible Automation for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Exam (EX294), you will be able to start without previous knowledge of Ansible. We take you from zero knowledge to be being exam ready with the 15 well-written chapters, each with practical examples that you can implement in your own environment.

We emphasize the need for practical examples, allowing you to really learn Ansible and learn it well. Although the exam will focus solely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we use both CentOS 8 and Ubuntu 18.04, permitting you to see some really cool features of Ansible that allow easy integration with multiple Linux distributions. I really do believe that this book offers better Ansible training than a course or training based on a single Linux distribution.

By the end of this book you will be ready for the exam, because you have been able to invest time in practicing the examples shown throughout the book. This will include installing Ansible on both CentOS and Ubuntu, and configuring the host inventory and Ansible configuration. You will begin your familiarity of Ansible by using ad hoc commands directly from the command line. Using ad hoc commands, you do not need to create Playbooks and you can get straight into configuring our remote managed devices. These commands introduce Ansible modules, and you will learn how to use examples straight from the documentation.

You will soon learn that ad hoc commands are an awesome quick start, but we need Playbooks to create repeatably correct configurations that are documented. Yes, the configuration files also act as your documentation showing how the hosts should be configured. You will learn to write YAML, the language used in Playbooks, as well as learning to configure your text editor to be an effective YAML editor.

Your main project that you work with during the book allows you to deploy an Apache-based LAMP server on both CentOS and Ubuntu. You will deploy web content that includes static web pages as well as PHP pages to see your stack in action. In deploying LAMP with Ansible, you will learn to use roles, tasks, handlers, variables, and conditional statementsall of which are required in the exam and in your workplace.

As an experienced Ansible administrator and trainer, I am able to help you prepare for the exam and share some of my knowledge, and I am honored to be on this journey with you.