It is hoped that, by now, this book has given you a sense of how you can automate your Enterprise Linux environment and the requirements for standardization that enable tasks to be performed efficiently at large scale. However, we have kept the example code very simple throughout this book and for good reason—it is not fair to assume that every reader will have a network with hundreds or even thousands of Linux machines to test these examples against.

Hence, this concluding chapter of this book is written to provide you with some important tips and tricks that will help you to better understand how to scale the examples in this book up to enterprise scale and how to do this in a manner that will not simply move you management headaches from one part of your infrastructure to another. Automation of your Linux environment should not in itself become a headache that you need to solve, and it is important to take several factors into account early on to prevent this. This chapter explores some of the most important facets of Ansible automation you should consider to ensure your automation journey is as smooth as possible.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Version control for your scripts
• Inventories – maintaining a single source of truth
• Handling one-off tasks