Ansible is a very powerful tool, but not just for deployment and configuration management. Although these are core strengths it possesses, it is also of powerful assistance when it comes to day-to-day management tasks. As ever, when coupled with an enterprise management tool such as AWX or Ansible Tower, it becomes incredibly important in the management of your Linux estate, especially for auditing and debugging purposes.

In this chapter, you learned how to tidy up disk space using Ansible, and how to make this conditional. You then learned how Ansible can help monitor configuration drift, and even alert to possible tampering with binary files. You learned how to manage processes on remote servers using Ansible, and finally, how to perform rolling updates in a graceful and managed fashion, across a load-balanced pool of servers.

In the next chapter, we take a look at securing your Linux servers in a standardized fashion, with CIS Benchmarks.