Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation (EX457)

For IT leaders: Manual, device-by-device CLI changes across Cisco, Juniper, and VyOS gear are slow to scale and hard to audit. One mistyped command can turn a routine change into an outage. This course gives network teams a shared, repeatable Ansible approach to that work.

• Role fit: Network engineers and system admins who already manage multivendor devices. Linux and Git basics are covered early, so CLI-first engineers can build the required foundation without a separate prerequisite course.
• Time investment: About 16 hours across 19 skills of roughly 50 minutes each. Learners can complete one or two skills a week alongside operational duties.
• Risk control: Learners practice Git version control, encryption, and authentication. They also use conditionals so changes hit only intended interfaces, block/rescue error handling so a playbook failure doesn't stop the remaining tasks, and automated configuration backups.
• Change management: The course covers Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.3, the version identified in the EX457 exam description, and shows how centralized automation workflows support more consistent team operations.

The course ends with automation workflows and covers routing protocols such as OSPF and BGP, VLANs, SNMP/Syslog, and DNS/NTP. Each skill closes with a validation challenge, so Team Leads can confirm understanding before engineers run playbooks in production. The course also supports readiness for the Red Hat EX457 specialist certification.

Network teams that still log into each switch to type enable, configure terminal, and NTP server commands by hand spend hours on changes that should take minutes. Every manual session is also a chance for drift or a typo. This training shows IT practitioners how to replace that work with tested, version-controlled Ansible playbooks across Cisco, Arista, Juniper, and VyOS devices.

The scenarios come straight from day-to-day network operations. One example sets interface descriptions by site (USA vs. France) and applies changes only to interfaces that are shut down. Another rolls out OSPF as an underlay for iBGP. A third captures device backups and recovers from failed tasks without halting the whole run.

• Targeted, lower-risk changes: Conditional logic means automation updates only the devices and interfaces that need it, instead of pushing the same config everywhere.
• Fewer failed rollouts: Block, rescue, and always error handling keeps playbooks running past a single failure, and teams practice reading error messages to catch mismatched variable keys before they cause outages.
• Consistent multivendor operations: Teams use inventory variables, including the Ansible Network OS variable, and vendor-agnostic module patterns to handle platform differences across network devices.
• Governed, repeatable automation: Git branching, Ansible Navigator execution environments, and Ansible Automation Platform organizations, teams, credentials, and inventories give Team Leads a controlled way to share and audit automation across the group.

After completing this course, IT teams will be able to apply Ansible network automation consistently across multivendor environments and prepare for the Red Hat EX457 exam.

Knowledge

• How Ansible connects to network devices, including when to use network_cli versus NETCONF (for example, Junos L2 interface modules require NETCONF to be enabled on Juniper devices)
• Where Ansible looks for group and host variables, the order of variable precedence, and how to access nested data and loop items
• How conditionals, Jinja2 templates, handlers, and roles produce targeted changes instead of pushing the same config to every interface
• How vendor collections for Cisco, Juniper, and VyOS differ, and how vendor-agnostic modules such as the CLI command module work across platforms
• How a RHEL-based Ansible lab connects to network devices for hands-on automation practice
• How Git branching, staging, and commits support version control for automation content

Ability

• Write and troubleshoot playbooks that send show commands and push configurations, including reading error messages to catch mismatched variable keys
• Automate VLANs, trunk links, SNMP, Syslog, DNS, NTP, OSPF, and iBGP across multivendor devices, and work around module quirks such as trunk encapsulation ordering on Cisco IOS
• Build backup playbooks that delegate local tasks to localhost and handle failures with block, rescue, and always
• Look up module documentation from the command line with ansible-doc
• Run Ansible playbooks from a RHEL-based lab environment and verify connectivity to managed network devices
• Manage inventory files, variables, and reusable automation content for network automation workflows