Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

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.

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From Infrastructure as Code to Policy as Code

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Ansible Tower LDAP with self signed CA

October 6, 2017

One of the big advantages that Ansible Tower and AWX (the open source and upstream version of Ansible Tower) bring to the table is the Role Base Access Control (RBAC). This will allow you to select which users (or teams) will be able to see which objects in Ansible Tower as well as which jobs they will be able to run. Obviously to leverage the RBAC, you will have to have personal accounts for every user of your platform.

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Ansible Tower Open Source

September 7, 2017

In October 2015, Red Hat bought Ansible Inc. As far as I know, in the acquisition, two close source components got acquired by Red Hat: Ansible Tower and Ansible Galaxy. Since the day of the acquisition, Red Hat has been very clear on the fact that those two components would have become open source at a certain point, even if there was not a public date or timeline yet. Making a codebase open source is not always easy and quick process.

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Ansible Tower 3.1 High Availability maintenance

August 18, 2017

Around one year ago, I did a post around Ansible Tower High Availability maintenance, but in the mean time many things changed and that post is not up to date anymore, so I decided to create a new one that covers the same topic but for Ansible Tower 3.1. From Ansible Tower 3.1 we lost the distinction of Primary Ansible Tower and Secondary Ansible Tower. That concept was related to the fact that the Secondary Ansible Towers were in a hot-standby mode.

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