The DevOps movement, agile development, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) have all played a role in reshaping the landscape of software engineering efforts throughout the world. Gone are the days of manual environment provisioning, a priesthood of release engineering, and late-night stale-pizza release parties. While the pizza may have been a highlight, it was hardly worth the 4am deployment nightmares. These now antiquated practices have been replaced with highly efficient delivery pipelines, scalable microservice architectures, and IaC automated configuration-management techniques. As a result of these innovations, a new demand for automation engineers, configuration-management personnel, and DevOps-oriented engineers has cropped up. This new demand for an engineering resource capable of both driving efficient development practices, automating configuration management, and implementing scalable software delivery has completely transformed the modern software organization.

In software engineering, the term DevOps is as equally diverse as it is popular. A simple Google search for the term DevOps yields roughly 18 million unique page results (that's a lot!). A search on Indeed.com for the term DevOps provides a diverse set of industry implementations. As with most culture-oriented terms, there is a buzzword definition and a deeper technical scope for the term DevOps. For the outsider, DevOps may seem a bit ambiguous. For this reason, it is often confused by organizations as an operations person who can code, or a developer who acts as an operational resource. This misnomer known as a DevOps engineer has led to significant confusion. Neither of the above provided definitions is 100% accurate.

In this book, we will add clarity to the practices surrounding the implementation of DevOps and provide you with the knowledge you will need to become both a successful DevOps and Ansible expert in your organization. In this book we will explore Ansible implementations and learn how it ties into DevOps solutions and processes. We will journey together through the Ansible and DevOps world and see how to leverage it for scalable deployments, configuration management, and automation. We will take this journey together and explore the exciting world of DevOps in Ansible 2 together. Let's get started!

In this first chapter, we are going to dive into DevOps and its methodology constructs to cover the following topics: