Getting to know your Ansible installation
By this stage in this chapter, regardless of your choice of operating system for your Ansible control machine, you should have a working installation of Ansible with which to begin exploring the world of automation. In this section, we will carry out a practical exploration of the fundamentals of Ansible to help you to understand how to work with it. Once you have mastered these basic skills, you will then have the knowledge required to get the most out of the remainder of this book. Let’s get started with an overview of how Ansible connects to non-Windows hosts.
Understanding how Ansible connects to hosts
With the exception of Windows hosts (as discussed at the end of the previous section), Ansible uses the SSH protocol to communicate with hosts. The reasons for this choice in the Ansible design are many, not least that just about every Linux/FreeBSD/macOS host has it built in, as do many network devices such as switches and routers...
