In this chapter, we have seen what IT automation is, its advantages and disadvantages, what kind of tools you can find, and how Ansible fits into this big picture. We have also seen how to install Ansible and how to create a Vagrant virtual machine. In the end, we analyzed the version control systems and spoke about the advantages Git brings to Ansible, if used properly.
In the next chapter, we will start looking at the infrastructure code that we mentioned in this chapter, without explaining exactly what it is and how to write it. We'll also see how to automate simple operations that you probably perform every single day, such as managing users, managing files, and file content.
