Why Ansible?

In this chapter, I will show you how to set up Ansible, and then we will use it to automate some configuration tasks. By the end of this chapter, you’ll understand the basic concepts you can use to start the process of automating deployments in your organization. You may be wondering, then, why Ansible and not one of the other solutions, such as Chef or Puppet?

Some configuration management solutions are relatively heavy from a resource perspective. With other solutions, you’ll generally have a central server, which will run a master program. This program will periodically check in with each server under its control by communicating with the agent installed on each server. Then, the agent will receive instructions from the central server and carry them out.

This means that you’ll need to maintain a server with modest CPU and RAM requirements, and the agent on the client side of the communication will also spend valuable CPU in order to carry...