Red Hat Services Management and Automation

Linux system administrators, site reliability engineers, and other IT professionals with some Ansible experience who are interested in learning how to manage and automate the deployment, configuration, and operation of key network services included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Be a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, or demonstrate equivalent skills in Linux system administration and Ansible automation.

Impact on the organization

This course will help your staff develop key skills in managing and automating common services that support and are used by your business-critical applications. These skills can assist your team in reducing time to deployment, improving reliability, and ensuring architectural compliance, allowing resources to be spent on improving rather than just running your business.

Red Hat has created this course in a way intended to benefit our customers, but each company and infrastructure is unique, and actual results or benefits may vary.

Impact on the individual

In this course, you will learn key system administration skills needed to set up and provide network services that are frequently used by servers and their applications in enterprise data centers. You will gain an understanding of how to manually manage these services, and you will also prepare Ansible playbooks to automate manual configuration tasks and perform them at scale.

• Provide key network services using software included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, including DNS with Unbound and BIND9, DHCP and DHCPv6, client e-mail transmission, printing service, NFS and SMB protocol file sharing, SQL database service with MariaDB, and web services using Apache HTTPD, nginx, Varnish, and HAProxy.
• Configure advanced networking for server use cases, including device teaming.
• Use Red Hat Ansible Engine to automate the manual deployment and configuration tasks covered in this course.

Manage network services

Discuss and review key tools and skills needed to manage network services.

Configure link aggregation

Improve the redundancy or throughput of network connections of servers by configuring Linux network teaming between multiple network interfaces.

Manage DNS and DNS servers

Explain the operation of DNS service, troubleshoot DNS issues, and configure servers to act as a DNS caching nameserver or as an authoritative name server.

Manage DHCP and IP address assignment

Explain and configure services used for IPv4 and IPv6 address assignment including DHCP, DHCPv6, and SLAAC.

Manage printers and printing files

Configure systems to print to a network printer that supports IPP Everywhere, as well as manage existing printer queues.

Configure email transmission

Discuss how mail servers operate, then configure a server to use system tools and Postfix to send email messages through an outbound mail relay.

Configure MariaDB SQL databases

Discuss the basic operation of SQL-based relational databases, perform basic SQL queries for troubleshooting, and be able to set up a simple MariaDB database service.

Configure web servers

Provide web content from Apache HTTPD or Nginx web servers, then configure them with virtual hosts and TLS-based encryption.

Optimize web server traffic

Improve performance of your web servers by using Varnish to cache static content being served and HAProxy to terminate TLS connections and balance load between servers.

Provide file-based network storage

Deliver simple file-based network shares to clients using the NFS and SMB protocols.

Access block-based network storage

Configure iSCSI initiators on your servers to access block-based storage devices provided by network storage arrays or Ceph storage clusters.