Summary
In this chapter, we have taken our first steps with Ansible by installing it locally and then, using Vagrant, launching a virtual machine to interact with. We learned about basic host inventory files and used the Ansible command to execute a single task against our virtual machine.
We then looked at playbooks, starting with a basic playbook that returned some information on our target before progressing to a playbook that updates all the installed operating system packages before installing and configuring the NTP service.
By the end of the chapter, we had launched a second virtual machine and quickly brought it up to the same configuration level as our first virtual machine.
In the next chapter, we will look at Ansible Galaxy and discuss how Ansible packages up and maintains its community modules.
