And yes, the excitement is really touching us all now, isn't it?
The end of another module,
a module where we've understood a little bit more about Ansible. So we only
need to worry about installing it upon our controller.
We don't have to worry about any long‑running services,
be it a server service or a client service. It's totally Python‑based, and
Python is installed, in most cases, on Linux systems by default. We can use
SSH to connect to Linux systems, and again,
that's a very common port that is used in managing your systems.
We can create an ansible.cfg as our configuration. We can
create it in our working directory. We can create an inventory,
which is a list of our managed nodes.
We've seen a simple inventory here where we can have groups, as well as
individual hosts, but also assign variables to our hosts.
We can use the command ansible by itself for managing our ad‑hoc configuration,
which is great for simple tasks that we want to run,
but for something more complex, then we're going to use
playbooks and the command ansible‑playbook,
so we can then repeat the configuration as we desire.
And that's the really important thing is repeatable configurations.
Now we've seen a little bit of our Infrastructure as Code when looking
at it from an Ansible perspective. We're now going to take a look at
it from a Puppet perspective.
In the next module, we're going to be taking a look at implementing Puppet for configuration management.