Ansible is a robust, powerful, open source tool that, once you have mastered a few simple concepts, can help you to achieve automation on a very large scale in your Linux environment. Ansible is agentless, and so requires no configuration on Linux client machines for you to begin your automation journey, and a robust community behind the project means that easy answers are available to most of the challenges you may wish to solve with it.
In this chapter, you learned the fundamentals of playbook structure and some of the key files required to run a simple playbook. You learned about the importance of inventories and how to use them, and how to efficiently reuse code with roles (and indeed, how to leverage code from the community to save you time and effort). You learned about variables and facts, and how to reference them in playbooks, and how to make use of Jinja2 templating...