Getting Started with Ansible

Information and communications technology (ICT) is often described as a fast-growing industry. I think that the best quality of the ICT industry is not related to its ability to grow at a super-high speed, but is related to its ability to revolutionize itself, and the rest of the world, at an astonishing pace.

Every 10 to 15 years there are major shifts in how this industry works, and every shift solves problems that were very hard to manage up to that point, creating new challenges. Also, at every major shift, many of the best practices of the previous iteration are classified as anti-patterns, and new best practices are created. Although it might appear that those changes are impossible to predict, this is not always true. Obviously, it is not possible to know exactly what changes will occur and when they will take place, but looking at companies with a large number of servers and many lines of code usually reveals what the next steps will be.

The current shift has already happened in big companies such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Facebook, and Google. It is the implementation of IT automation systems to create and manage servers.

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

• IT automation
• What is Ansible?
• The secure shell
• Installing Ansible
• Creating a test environment with Vagrant
• Version control systems
• Using Ansible with Git