Jayden Smith
Professor Erskine
CNT 4603E
9/4/26
RH294: Weekly Summary
This week I learned the fundamentals of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, including how it
works as an automation tool that connects to managed hosts over SSH instead of requiring
software installed on every system. I covered the architecture (control node and managed hosts),
how Ansible uses YAML for its playbooks, and completed the lab where I had to install Ansible
Automation Platform and verified it was working.
In the second half of the week I built an inventory of managed hosts and wrote my first
playbook, learning how plays, tasks, and modules fit together to automate multi step processes
across systems. Running the playbook and seeing the tasks execute in order helped me
understand how much time automation saves compared to configuring each host manually, and
gave me a good introduction to idempotency, which is the idea that running a playbook
repeatedly shouldn't cause unwanted changes if the system is already in the desired state. This
gave me a solid foundation to build on going into variables, facts, and more complex playbooks
in the future.