You should, by now, have a base Linux image for deployment in your enterprise. If you chose to download a ready-made template (or indeed, to make use of one provided by a public cloud provider), then your image will be very much a blank template, ready for customization. If you chose to build your own, then you may have already chosen to perform a small amount of customization such as the installation of cloud-init that we performed earlier. You will note, however, that we did this by hand, which is hardly along the line of the scalable, repeatable, auditable processes that we have lauded throughout the early parts of this book. As we proceed through this section of this chapter, we will take a look at how to customize a base template, regardless of its origin, using Ansible.
There is no one-size-fits-all Linux image that will...