Ansible provides a very robust set of tools that can aid immensely in operational implementations. Common operational implementations include managing the configuration of a given system (ensuring that packages are installed, files are present, directory structures exist, and so on), provisioning a given system to meet a set of prerequisites, and more. As we discovered earlier, playbooks and their tasks help us achieve these goals by executing a set of automations against a given system.
While the knowledge we have gained can give us the basics we need to implement simple automations, we have really just barely scratched the surface of how Ansible works. Ansible integrates with hundreds of system-level tasks and thousands of external third-party solutions and can be leveraged in ways we haven't even begun to fathom. Let's peel back the layers a bit and see how we can leverage Ansible for basic Configuration Management.
Ansible provides the bulk of its task functionality through...