Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation (EX457)

Manual network changes across mixed-vendor environments increase outage risk, slow change windows, and make standardization harder to prove. IT Directors and Team Leads can assign this intermediate EX457 course to network automation engineers, Linux administrators, and DevOps-oriented IT Practitioners who need a structured path from Ansible basics to network-focused automation.

The course requires about 16 hours per learner and is best assigned to staff who already understand networking fundamentals and can work at the Linux command line. Teams should plan for change-management discipline: version control with Git, reusable playbooks, encrypted credentials, error handling, and staged automation workflows before applying changes broadly.

CBT Nuggets capabilities such as Playlists and Team Reporting help Training Managers assign this certification-aligned path, monitor completion, and keep network automation upskilling visible across the team.

IT teams complete this training to move repeatable network operations out of one-off CLI work and into documented, reusable Ansible automation. The curriculum focuses on practical automation patterns across Arista, Juniper, and VyOS environments, with coverage for routing, monitoring, backups, and workflow management.

• Reduce configuration drift by building Ansible playbooks, variables, roles, handlers, and Jinja2 templates that standardize network changes.
• Improve change reliability by applying conditions, data transformation, authentication, encryption, backups, and error handling before automations affect production devices.
• Support multi-vendor operations by automating Arista, Juniper, and VyOS devices, plus VLANs, SNMP, syslog, OSPF, BGP, DNS, and NTP.
• Prepare teams for EX457 objectives with hands-on exposure to Ansible Navigator, Ansible Automation Platform concepts, and automation workflow management.

Knowledge

• Linux and Git basics needed to support Ansible network automation workflows.
• How Ansible playbooks, variables, conditions, handlers, roles, and Jinja2 templates fit together.
• Methods for managing authentication and encryption in automation projects.
• How Ansible applies to Arista, Juniper, and VyOS network devices.
• Automation concepts for VLANs, SNMP, syslog, OSPF, BGP, DNS, and NTP.
• The role of Ansible Navigator, Ansible Automation Platform, and workflow management in network automation.

Ability

• Create Ansible playbooks for repeatable network configuration tasks.
• Use variables, conditions, and data transformation to make automations reusable.
• Build Jinja2-based templates for dynamic network configurations.
• Automate common multi-vendor services and routing features.
• Create backups and handle errors during automation runs.
• Align study and practice with the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Ansible Network Automation EX457 exam path.