Before we finish this chapter, I would like to just finish up my own personal journey. As mentioned elsewhere in the chapter, I moved from my collection of scripts and runbooks to Puppet, which was great until my requirements moved away from managing just server configuration and maintaining the state of the servers I was managing.
I needed to start to manage infrastructure in public clouds. This requirement quickly started to frustrate me when using Puppet. At the time, Puppet's coverage of the APIs I need to use for my infrastructure was lacking. I am assured it is a lot better now, but also I found myself having to build too much logic into my manifests with regard to the order in which each task was executed.
It is around this time, which was December 2014, that I decided to look at Ansible. I know this because I wrote a blog post entitled First Steps With Ansible, and since then, I don't think I have looked back. I have since introduced several of my work colleagues and customers to Ansible, as well as writing previous books for Packt.
In this chapter, we have taken a look at my own personal history with both Ansible and some of the other tools that Ansible is compared to, and we have discussed the differences between these tools and also where Ansible originated.
In the next chapter, we are going to look at installing Ansible and running our first playbooks against a local virtual machine.