June 17, 2024
I took the EX358 exam a few years back and therefore it recently expired.
Since the exam is still available, I decided to take it again to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation certification and, therefore, extend my Red Hat Certified Architect certification.
This time around, I had the impression that the exam had changed quite a bit from the last time I took it.
While the previous time the exam reminded me mostly of an Ansible certification, this time it reminded me way more of the old RHCE exam (the EX300).
The bulk of the exam was about configuring the various services, while in the previous version, there was a lot more focus on the Ansible part, which is more like the EX294.
It is also true that EX300 was phasing out at the time, but it was still an exam many people had, while EX294 was fairly new.
However, as I suggested the previous time, it is still crucial to be able to perform all configurations manually and with Ansible because you can not know what you will be tasked to perform manually and what you will be tasked to perform using Ansible.
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January 24, 2024 - Barcelona, ES
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January 23, 2024 - Barcelona, ES
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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.
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September 30, 2022
I still remember when 15 years ago, the topic of Infrastructure as Code was beginning to be discussed.
At the time, the majority of tools we know and use for Infrastructure as Code did not exist.
Some people and companies realized the need for such a paradigm, while many others were skeptical or against it.
In the last few months, I had a kind of a Deja Vu when I started to have conversations with some stakeholders around Policy as Code, or as someone prefers to call it, Compliance as Code.
The idea behind Policy as Code is that if it was possible to write policies in a language that is both easily readable by a human and a computer, we could better govern IT.
Policy as Code is not a new concept by itself.
In fact, in Infrastructure as Code software such as Ansible, it is possible to create a Playbook to assess if a system is in the expected state.
The problem, though, is that a Playbook written with Ansible with this scope is not always evident if read by people that are not highly trained on the topic.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog