Effective automation in an enterprise setting goes beyond writing Ansible playbooks and roles—it is all about maintaining single sources of truth so that you can always have confidence in your automation processes. It is also about leveraging your chosen tool for as many purposes as possible, including assisting you with playbook and role development, and in helping you with one-off tasks that do not necessarily warrant a playbook (although this is discouraged as it removes some of the auditing capability offered by playbook development and effective use of AWX/Ansible Tower).

In this chapter, you learned how to make effective use of version control to maintain a history of your Linux environment. You then gained hands-on experience in using dynamic inventories for Ansible to prevent discrepancies in deployments and to ensure that both your inventories and playbooks can be trusted. Finally, you learned how to handle one-off tasks using Ansible and even assist your own playbook development.

That concludes our book on Linux automation in the enterprise—I hope that you have found it valuable and that it will assist you on your own journey of effective automation in a large scale setting.