In May 2019 we saw the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and a change of focus in the RHCE certification at Red Hat. Rather than focusing on the services as was in the previous RHCE, the focus is on configuration management with Ansible. As you server estates  grow and your HR budget decreases management of your systems has to be streamlined and efficient. This is where Ansible comes in. The Red Hat course for the latest RHCE is RH294 and the practical exam is EX294. The following blogs and videos are designed to get you up and running with the new certification and Ansible. New blogs are created regularly so please keep this bookmarked to keep you prepared for EX294 and the RHCE.

Although the new RHCE certification and the EX294 exam is based on RHEL 8 the reality is that you are tested on Ansible and not the OS per se. Of course, the Ansible yum module will be needed and not the apt module. Knowing the package names for Red Hat and groups names such as wheel over sudo. But other than those differences you could study on a recent version of Debian or Ubuntu. A better solution would be CentOS 7 as the underlying packaging system and groups structure is the same. At some stage CentOS 8 will be available replicating RHEL 8 without need of a subscription. My demonstration use RHEL 8 as the Ansible controller and both RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 1804 as managed nodes.

1. Installing Ansible on RHEL 8 / CentOS 7
2. Ansible from 30,000 feet
3. Building an Ansible Inventory File
4. Creating Playbooks – Deploy Ansible User with Sudo access
5. Using variables in Ansible inventory
6. Managing users with Ansible 2.8