While there are numerous ways to automate tasks on Linux, there is one technology that stands out above the rest for automation at scale, and that is Ansible. Although it is entirely possible to automate a task (or tasks) easily with a shell script, there are a number of disadvantages to this, the most significant being that shell scripting does not scale up well in large environments. It should be said that there are other automation tools, but Ansible makes use of native communication protocols (for example, SSH on Linux, and WinRM on Windows) and hence is completely agentless! This makes deploying it into existing environments simple. While automation with Ansible is a huge, in-depth subject, this chapter is intended to cover the basics and get you up and running rapidly so that, even if you have no prior experience, you can follow the automation examples in this book. Indeed, this is one of the reasons for the rapid and widespread adoption of Ansible over the last few years—although it is incredibly powerful, getting started and automating your first tasks is extremely simple.

In this chapter, we will cover the following Ansible topics:

• Exploring the Ansible playbook structure
• Exploring inventories in Ansible
• Understanding roles in Ansible
• Understanding Ansible variables
• Understanding Ansible templates
• Bringing Ansible and the SOE together