Therefore, to put in more practical terms,
we're solving two problems by implementing Ansible configuration
management in our Active Directory environment.
Number 1 is the pain and human error involved in
manually configuring each server.
Those days are long over.
I've been in the IT industry since the mid‑90s,
so I've seen a lot in terms of trends,
and one is shrinking hardware infrastructure with VMs.
But you still have to manually configure those VMs
of which you might have dozens, hundreds, or thousands.
It's untenable to do this manually.
Another big problem that we're solving is configuration drift.
You may in your business be required, regulatory compliance,
etc., to document that your machines have such and so desired state
configured on them and you're preventing them from drifting out.
For instance, you may have the systems configured in compliance,
but then your colleague doing everything in their power to be a good employee.
I'm not inferring any negative behavior, but they knock
a server out of its desired state.
This is going to cause problems for everybody.
You want to keep track of those changes.
This is where Ansible comes in.