Using Ansible with GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps

In this chapter, we will start running Ansible in the cloud instead of our local machines, something we have been doing up to this point.

First, this chapter will examine two services I often use during my day job:

• Running GitHub Actions
• Running pipelines in Azure DevOps

Before we move on, we will examine tools designed to execute Ansible from a central location in Chapter 16, Introducing Ansible AWX and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Neither of the two services we will be looking at has what you would call native support for Ansible; however, they both provide ephemeral compute resources that can be configured using YAML, which you can ship alongside your playbook code.

This chapter will cover a more complex playbook in both GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps. We will also discuss some considerations when running Ansible away from your machine.

So, rather than discussing it anymore, let’s dive...