Chapter 2 - Automating Your IT Infrastructure with Ansible

1. Ansible is an open source automation platform used for running tasks across an inventory of servers. It differs from a simple shell script in that it will (when using native modules) only attempt to make changes when they are required (hence resulting in a consistent state), and it offers native support for remote connections to other machines (using SSH on Linux) and encryption of sensitive data and makes use of highly readable, self-documenting code.
2. An Ansible inventory is simply a list of servers against which an Ansible playbook is to be run.
3. Ansible has built-in features to make it easy to reuse roles—hence, a single role might find application in several playbooks. Conversely, if the code is written in a single large playbook, the only way to reuse the code in a different playbook is to copy and paste, which...