In this chapter, we learned about Ansible, the IT automation tool. We looked at how it works, and how to create an inventory file so Ansible can manage different servers, and how to write playbooks, which can work with some of the different modules.

We installed the software and learned to update the package manager cache with the apt module, and packages that are services were then started and managed with the service module. The template module allowed us to copy files from our control machine to the Ansible-managed machine. In order to trigger service reloads, we looked into notifying handlers after specific tasks occur.

To create and manage, files, folders, and symlinks the file module was used, and we used the cron module to create and manage cron jobs. Users and groups were created and managed with the user and group modules and finally we looked into running commands with the command and shell modules.

In the next chapter, we will take a look at Chef, the final provisioner that...