To get the most out of this book

To follow the examples provided in this book, you will need access to a computer platform capable of running Ansible. Currently, Ansible can be run on any machine with Python 2.7 or Python 3 (versions 3.5 and higher) installed (Windows is supported for the control machine, but only through a Linux distribution running in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) layer available on newer versions—see Chapter 4, Ansible and Windows – Not Just for Linux, for details). Operating systems supported include (but are not limited to) Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, macOS, and FreeBSD.

This book uses the Ansible 4.x.x series release. Ansible installation instructions can be found at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/installation_guide/intro_installation.html.

Some examples use Docker version 20.10.8. Docker installation instructions can be found at https://docs.docker.com/get-docker/.

A handful of examples in this book make use of accounts on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. More information about these services may be found at https://aws.amazon.com/ and https://azure.microsoft.com, respectively. We also delve into the management of OpenStack with Ansible, and the examples in this book were tested against a single all-in-one instance of DevStack as per the instructions found here: https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/.

Finally, Chapter 13, Network Automation, makes use of Arista vEOS 4.26.2F and Cumulus VX version 4.4.0 in the example code—please see here for more information: https://www.arista.com/en/support/software-download and https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/networking/ethernet-switching/cumulus-vx/. If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book's GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.