The importance of version control in IT automation

Like any other software, configurations, or scripts, it is not a best practice to keep your Ansible playbooks and configurations on the local machine, which is the Ansible control node. There are many reasons for not keeping the automation content on the local Ansible control node. A few of them are listed here:

• If something happens to the Ansible control node, you will lose all your automation content, which is not desirable.
• If someone accidentally deletes any files or changes any configurations, you will not have the opportunity to restore the original content.
• If you want to make any changes to configurations or playbooks, then you need to make a backup of files and configurations. This is general practice in case something goes wrong and you want to restore an old version of your files.

You need to consider the Ansible automation content as software code, which should keep track of every change and have...