Ansible enables you to easily deploy applications and systems consistently and repeatably using native communication protocols such as SSH and WinRM. Perhaps most importantly, Ansible is agentless and so requires nothing to be installed on the managed systems (except for Python, which, these days, is present on most systems). As a result, it enables you to build a simple yet robust automation platform for your environment.

Ansible is simple and straightforward to install and comes packaged for most modern systems. Its architecture is serverless as well as agentless, and so it has a minimal footprint. You can choose to run it from a central server or your own laptop—the choice is entirely yours. You can manage anything from a single host to hundreds of thousands of remote hosts from one Ansible control machine. All remote machines can be (with sufficient playbooks being written) managed by Ansible, and with everything created correctly, you may never have to log in to any of these machines individually again.

In this chapter, we will begin to teach you the practical skills to cover the very fundamentals of Ansible, starting with how to install Ansible on a wide variety of operating systems. We will then look at how to configure Windows hosts to enable them to be managed with Ansible automation, before delving into greater depth on the topic of how Ansible connects to its target hosts. We'll then look at node requirements and how to validate your Ansible installation, before finally looking at how to obtain and run the very latest Ansible source code if you wish to either contribute to its development or gain access to the very latest of features.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Installing and configuring Ansible
• Understanding your Ansible installation
• Running from source versus pre-built RPMs