Summary
In this chapter, we discussed Ansible – a simple tool for orchestration and automation. It can be used both in open source and Microsoft-based environments as it supports both natively. Open source systems can be accessed via SSH keys, while Microsoft operating systems can be accessed by using WinRM and PowerShell. We learned a lot about simple Ansible tasks and more complex ones since deploying a multi-tier application that's hosted on multiple virtual machines isn't an easy task to do – especially if you're approaching the problem manually. Even deploying a KVM hypervisor on multiple hosts can take quite a bit of time, but we managed to solve that with one simple Ansible playbook. Mind you, we only needed some 20 configuration lines to do that, and the upshot of that is that we can easily add hundreds of more hosts as targets for this Ansible playbook.
The next chapter takes us to a world of cloud services – specifically OpenStack &...
