As we have already touched upon, one of the key reasons for the rapid uptake of Ansible is the fact that it can integrate, without an agent, into most major operating systems. For example, a single Ansible host can automate commands on just about any other Linux (or BSD) host to which it can connect over SSH. It can even automate tasks on Windows hosts that have had remote WinRM enabled, and it is here that we start to uncover the real power of Ansible.
In the previous section of this chapter, we only looked at Ansible running against the implicit localhost, without using SSH. Ansible supports two different kinds of inventories: static and dynamic. Throughout this book, we will mostly work with static inventories, as they serve the examples we are working with. Indeed, static inventories are perfect for small environments, where the workload of...