My journey to becoming a DevOps expert, a trainer, an entrepreneur, and with this book, an author, is full of interesting stories, people, and experiences. The seeds for my professional expertise were sown during my engineering days, when I was introduced to the open, friendly, and limitless world of free software by evangelists such as Trevor Warren, Dinesh Shah, and Dr. Nagarjuna G, with support and encouragement of a few seniors, especially Gurpreet Singh. I took Linux as a passion and quickly became the point man for any queries on computer networks and Linux.

I feel extremely fortunate to have converted my passion into a profession. My long stint at Efficient Frontier (now Adobe) has been the cornerstone of my technical foundation. It was an ocean of knowledge with great minds at work. I am honored to have worked alongside and learn from experts, namely Harold Barker, Alex Eulenberg, David Gould, and Anand Ranganathan, from whom I learned various aspects of IT Operational practices. I would like to thank Vikram Vijayaraghavan, Harold Sasaki, and Mohan Gopalakrishanan, who truly empowered me and showed me how to lead. I would also like to thank Ashok and Dennis for being great teammates.

I am deeply indebted to Michael DeHaan, the creator of the Ansible project, and the community members who have contributed toward developing, implementing, documenting, and evangelizing such a fantastic product, that is, Ansible. Without their efforts, this book would have been impossible.

I would like to thank the editing, publishing, and reviewing teams, especially Amey Varangaonkar, Abhishek Kotian, and Vinay Argekar, with whom I have been interacting, and the numerous other contributors working behind the scenes. Thank you for being extremely patient and flexible, accommodating my busy schedules, bringing me back on track, and helping me through the process toward the completion of this book. The job of reviewers is not easy. I especially thank Oliver, Ajey, Aditya, and Ben for thoroughly reviewing my work and coming up with invaluable suggestions that contributed toward improving the quality of this book significantly.

Most importantly, I would like to mention my family, which includes my parents, Rajul and Jawahar; my wife, Khushboo; my sister, Swarada; and my brother-in-law, Mayuresh, who have stood by me through thick and thin and love me unconditionally. I must thank Khushboo, my loving wife, who has supported me in all my ventures.

I dedicate this book to my father, Dr. Jawahar Shah, the most positive person I have ever met in my life, who bravely fought the battle against a formidable foe, ALS, and survived. You are my hero, Pappa!