Ansible (http://www.ansible.com) is a configuration management tool that takes a different approach to system management. Rather than using an agent-driven model to drive provisioning, Ansible executes commands on remote nodes using SSH. For our purposes, setting up Ansible provisioning is somewhat simpler as there is not an agent or infrastructure to bootstrap, as there were in the previous three recipes. Ansible does, however, require that the Ansible software be installed on the host machine, as provisioning operations begin and are performed by the host on Vagrant machines.
Note
As Ansible is designed to execute commands using SSH; support for Windows operating systems is not currently available. At the time of writing this book, the Ansible team has announced some Windows support and plans to expand Ansible support for PowerShell infrastructure. See http://www.ansible.com/blog/windows-is-coming for further details. This recipe will apply...