Ansible Tower Essentials

This lecture explores common enterprise automation challenges like security, infrastructure drift, compliance gaps, and lack of visibility. It explains how Ansible Automation Controller(Ansible Tower) provides a comprehensive platform to address these multifaceted issues and manage automation efficiently at scale.

This lecture explains how Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower) acts as the automation expert or "maestro" that enables coordination between components and systems. It highlights key capabilities like granular access control, centralized logging, push button deployment, workflow visualization, enterprise integrations, and more that allow smooth and efficient automation orchestration.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller, orchestration, access control, push button deployment, workflows

This lecture provides an overview of the lab environment used for demos in the course. It outlines the key components like the Automation Controller node, target nodes, authentication methods, and network connectivity. The goal is to provide a baseline lab topology for learners to follow along with the demos.

Keywords: lab environment, demo, Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), SSH keys, Ansible

This lecture covers planning and prerequisites before installing Ansible Automation Platform and the Automation Controller component. It discusses options like standalone vs full platform, on-prem vs cloud, required hardware resources, software prerequisites, and obtaining license keys. The goal is to ensure smooth installation by carefully evaluating needs, constraints, and requirements.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), installation, planning, prerequisites, hardware, software, licensing

This lecture demonstrates downloading the Ansible Automation Controller bundled installer and obtaining a 60-day trial license key from Red Hat's website. The bundled installer contains all necessary RPMs for a standalone installation. The trial license provides full access to Automation Controller features for evaluation purposes.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller,(aka Ansible Tower) bundled installer, trial license, RPMs, subscription manifest

This lecture demonstrates installing a standalone Ansible Automation Controller on an AWS cloud instance using the bundled installer. It shows configuring the inventory, running the setup script, verifying a successful deployment via the web UI, and activating the trial license. The goal is to get Automation Controller operational quickly using the streamlined bundled installer approach.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), installation, bundled installer, AWS, cloud, web UI, trial license

This lecture validates the Ansible Automation Controller installation by launching the bundled demo job template. It shows reviewing the template details, initiating the job, monitoring progress in real-time, and verifying successful completion. The goal is to confirm core automation functionality is working properly.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(Aka Ansible Tower), demo job template, installation validation, automation job

This lecture provides a tour of the Ansible Automation Controller user interface. It covers the layout structure and navigating key sections like Dashboard, Resources, Access, Administration, Settings, Activity Stream, and more. The goal is to orient learners and help them find their way around the UI.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), user interface, UI, layout, navigation, dashboard

This lecture introduces the section on user and access management in Ansible Automation Controller. It provides an overview of concepts like organizations, users, teams, roles, permissions, and delegation that will be covered in the section. The goal is to highlight the importance of role-based access control in securely scaling automation across an organization.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), access control, users, teams, roles, permissions, delegation

This lecture provides a high-level overview of the main objects in Ansible Automation Controller, including organizations, users, teams, projects, inventories, credentials, job templates, workflows, schedules, and notifications. It explains how these components relate and interact to enable infrastructure automation management.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), objects, organizations, users, teams, projects, inventories, credentials, job templates, workflows

This lecture introduces user types in Ansible Automation Controller like system admins, normal users, and auditors. It explains the concept of teams for grouping users and managing permissions efficiently. The lecture also provides an overview of role-based access control for delegating automation tasks securely.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower), users, teams, system admins, normal users, auditors, RBAC

This lecture introduces an engaging scenario of working for a fictional aerospace company called Red Planet as they prepare for a mission to Mars. You will roleplay as a new hire tasked with transitioning Red Planet's infrastructure automation to Ansible Automation Controller. The scenario aims to provide practical context for skills covered in the course.

Keywords: Red Planet, scenario, infrastructure automation, Ansible Automation Controller

This lecture demonstrates setting up an example team structure in Ansible Automation Controller for the fictional Red Planet company. It shows creating various user roles. Teams are then constructed to group these roles logically.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller, teams, roles, infrastructure

This lecture dives deeper into role-based access control in Ansible Automation Controller. It covers advanced topics like granular permissions for different objects, approval requirements, rbac tokens, and delegation. The goal is to understand how to fully leverage rbac for managing secure access to automation tasks.

Keywords: Ansible Automation Controller, rbac, permissions, approval requirements, delegation

This lecture demonstrates how to configure role-based access control (RBAC) in Ansible Automation Controller. It shows how to create teams, assign organization-wide roles like Project Admin and Credential Admin, and grant inventory-specific roles like Inventory Ad-hoc to individual users. Proper RBAC configuration allows securely delegating automation tasks across teams as infrastructure scales up.

This introductory lecture previews the key topics that will be covered in the Ansible Automation Controller Fundamentals section. It highlights the core concepts of inventories, credentials, projects, and job templates. Learning these foundational skills will equip you to start automating immediately with Controller.

This lecture provides an overview of inventories in Ansible Automation Controller. It explains the different inventory types like static, cloud, smart, and constructed. Inventory plugins like AWS and GCP are also discussed. Inventories are crucial for identifying and managing infrastructure in Controller.

This demo walks through creating a static inventory from scratch in Automation Controller. It shows how to add new hosts and groups and assign variables. Static inventories provide manually defined lists of hosts and form an inventory foundation.

This demo continues a previous AWS integration, enhancing it by configuring dynamic groups based on EC2 instance properties. The AWS inventory plugin's configuration options are explored. Dynamic cloud inventories that auto-update save time as infrastructure scales. Powerful querying and grouping streamline instance management.

This lecture explains credentials in Automation Controller like machine, network, cloud, and vault credentials. Credentials allow securely connecting to systems without exposing passwords and keys. Storing credentials centrally aids security and collaboration.

This demo creates a non-root machine credential. A private key is securely stored in Controller. Following security best practices, nodes are managed as non-privileged users via sudo escalation. Credentials enable automation portability across environments.

This lecture explores projects for managing automation content in Ansible Automation Controller(aka Ansible Tower). Projects provide logical collections of playbooks from local files or source control like Git.  Projects bring modularity and version control to automation code.

This demo creates an Ansible Tower project integrated with a GitHub repository containing sample playbooks.

This lecture introduces job templates, which encapsulate parameters like playbooks, inventories, and credentials to launch Ansible jobs. Templates provide easy, repeatable execution and delegation of automation tasks.

This comprehensive demo walks through configuring a job template from start to finish and launching it.

This lecture explores surveys for prompting users for extra variables when launching job templates. Surveys make playbooks adaptable across environments.

This lecture demonstrates scheduling job templates to run at later times in Controller.  Integrated scheduling replaces disjointed cron jobs for streamlined automation execution.

This lecture explores notifications in Controller for job status alerts.

This lecture continues an AWS integration, further enhancing it with dynamic groups and instance state filtering. The inventory plugin's advanced configuration options are leveraged to improve instance management.