So far, we have been targeting Linux servers. In this chapter, we will take a look at the ever-growing collection of core Ansible modules that support and interact with Windows-based servers. Personally, coming from an almost exclusively macOS and Linux background, it felt a little odd to be using a tool that is not natively supported on Windows to manage Windows.
However, as I am sure you will agree by the end of the chapter, its developers have made the process of introducing Windows workloads into your playbook as seamless and familiar as possible.
In this chapter, we will learn how to build our Windows servers locally using Vagrant and then take our playbooks to the public cloud. We will cover:
- Enabling features in Windows
- Launching Windows instances in AWS
- Creating users
- Installing third-party packages using Chocolatey
