Understanding Ansible

One of the primary roles of a competent administrator is to try and automate themselves out of everything they possibly can. There is a saying that you must do everything manually at least once. If you must do it again, you will probably be annoyed by it, and the third time you must do it, you will automate the process. When we talk about automation, it can mean a lot of different things.

Let's try to explain this with an example as this is the most convenient way of describing the problem and solution. Let's say that you're working for a company that needs to deploy 50 web servers to host a web application, with standard configuration. Standard configuration includes the software packages that you need to install, the services and network settings that need to be configured, the firewall rules that need to be configured, and the files that need to be copied from a network share to a local disk inside a virtual machine so that we can serve these...