In this module, you will learn the ins and outs of Ansible with the goal of managing and automating your infrastructure and code’s deployment.

DevOps for Developers

Ansible is one of the leading tools for software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. In this module, you will learn the ins and outs of Ansible with the goal of managing and automating your infrastructure and code’s deployment.

You will learn how to set up a docker environment, connect with cloud providers like AWS and Azure, manage infrastructure on AWS and Azure using Ansible, and lastly how to automate configuration and state management processes. Throughout each section, you will dive into the fundamentals of Ansible through practical and real-world scenarios.

By the end, you will have a great new skill that will open a lot of doors for you like cloud computing and DevOps. This will definitely be a good tool to put on your resume and will help you further your career.

Ansible

> ## Objective
  > The objective of this chapter is to connect Ansible to a cloud platform.
<br> 
> ### Steps
> 1. Choose the connection method.
> 2. Create environment variables.
> 3. Verify connection to the cloud platform.

# Cloud integration
Cloud computing has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Cloud providers help abstract the complexities of managing and securing our own data centers. The _pay-as-you-go_ model helps reduce the costs and shifts focus to the more important areas.

A common misconception is that clouds are merely servers, but there is much more going on under the hood.
To name a few things, we have:
- Security Groups.
- Role-based Access Control.
- Networking

We will look at these in quite some detail in the next few chapters.

The question arises, "How does _Ansible_ help us in all this?" The answer is; Ansible provides a wide range of modules to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure. All the major cloud providers have exposed API endpoints to interact with their services. Ansible uses them in its modules internally to save us the pain of going through them ourselves. 

This API-driven management is what makes cloud computing so powerful.  






Get introduced to the objectives of this chapter and how Ansible comes into play with cloud providers.

Introduction

Objective