Modernize mainframes operations with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

 February 8, 2023 -  ,

Red Hat EX374 exam

 November 16, 2022

Yesterday I did the Red Hat EX374 exam, which allows becoming Red Hat Certified Specialist in Developing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform.

This exam is my sixth Ansible exam/certification, so the question is always, how is this similar or different from the others? This exam is one of the furthest ones from the others since it focuses on Ansible Automation Platform 2 instead of Ansible Core or Ansible Tower. This change was welcomed since AAP has many more moving parts and features compared to previous products.

Modernize mainframes operations and workloads with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Platform

 November 3, 2022 -  Whittlebury, UK

Modernize IBM zSystems with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

 June 28, 2022 -  Böblingen, DE

Obtain an Ansible Job output from Ansible Tower API

 April 27, 2022

A couple of years back, I wrote a blogpost on obtaining the previous Job ID in Ansible Tower workflow. Now, let’s go further and create another module to obtain the output of such a job.

Before moving further, I want to specify that I talk about Ansible Tower since this is the most known name for this software, but I could also be talking about AWX or Ansible Controller since those are the same codebase. AWX is the open-source upstream project. Ansible Tower is the former name of the Red Hat product based on AWX. Ansible Controller is the name of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2 component based on AWX.

Make your environment sane with Ansible Automation

 April 5, 2022 -  ,

Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation

 March 31, 2021

Late last year, I’ve read that a new Ansible-related exam was available: the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation exam (EX358). I’ve taken and passed this exam at the end of January. It was the first time I did a Red Hat exam that was brand new and without having the possibility of finding online some opinions around it.

Some people have reported for other exams that when new exams are launched, the scoring has issues. I’ve not noticed such an issue with this exam, so I was pleased about it.

Red Hat Certified Specialist in Advanced Automation

 February 1, 2021

In my pursuit of the Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) certification, I’ve taken the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Advanced automation: Ansible best practices exam (EX447). As for the other Ansible Exams, you can always consult the Ansible documentation available offline in the exam system. Different from the Red Hat Certified Engineer exam (EX294), this exam also includes Ansible Tower as a topic, so be sure to have good knowledge of it as well!

Red Hat Certified Engineer

 December 28, 2020

At the beginning of this month, I took the EX294 exam, which allowed me to obtain the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification. It was the first time I attempted the RHCE exam, but I prepared myself in the past for the EX300 exam, the exam that allowed you to obtain the RHCE certification in the RHEL7 time, but never got around to do the exam.

Compared to what I had to study for the EX300, I found the EX294 program way more sensible. An aspect I’ve never liked about the EX300 was that you needed to learn many implementation details, such as the in-scope applications’ configuration format. EX294 changed this aspect since it is based on Ansible, and Ansible abstracts the majority of implementation details of the various applications.

Obtain previous Job ID in Ansible Tower Workflow

 November 15, 2020

Ansible Tower allows you to create Workflows, which enable you to create complex workflows by putting together multiple Ansible Playbooks. Ansible Tower Workflows can have some simple logics, such as run different Ansible Playbooks based on the outcome (success or failure) of a previous Ansible Playbook run. Sometimes, though, you need to have more information about a previous Ansible Playbook run than just the outcome.

I recently found myself in a situation where I had an Ansible Tower Workflow with two Ansible Playbooks into it, where the first one was performing specific tasks. The second one needed to get and process the output of the first Ansible Playbook. Since Ansible Tower provides an API to fetch an Ansible Playbook run output, this part is trivial if you know the Job ID that Ansible Tower assigned to that specific run. Looking around, I’ve not found much information on how to retrieve the Job ID of a different Job, so I looked at the various APIs and found this solution, which I’m going to share with you today. I’ve not found much information about getting another Job ID because it is usually a bad practice to do such a thing and that very often you can achieve the same goal in a much cleaner way. This better option, though, was not present in my case. Due to many constraints I had in this project, this was the best way I’ve found, even if I’ve tried - at least mentally - many other ways before accepting that this was the only one in my case.