Software distribution strategy

Deploying applications is probably one of the most complex tasks in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field. This is mainly caused by the fact that it often requires changing the state of the majority of machines that are somehow part of that application. In fact, often you find yourself having to change the state of load balancers, distribution servers, application servers, and database servers all at the same time during a deployment. New technologies, like containers, are trying to make those operations simpler, but often is not easy or possible to just move a legacy application to a container.

What we are now going to see are the various software distribution strategies and how Ansible can help with each one.

Copying files from the local machine

This is probably the oldest strategy to distribute software. The idea is to have the files on the local machine (often used to develop the code) and as soon as the change is made, a copy of the file...