So a little bit on what Ansible is formally.
It's a free and open‑source CM automation software.
It's at GitHub.
Written originally by Michael DeHaan in 2012,
Red Hat acquired Ansible in 2015, and they are the official owners today,
even though the software is free and open source.
Ansible competes with products like Red Hat, Puppet, Chef, SaltStack.
In Windows land or in PowerShell land, we have DSC,
or desired state configuration, HashiCorp Terraform,
Rudder.
Those are all products that are fit within the same realm as Ansible.
What else?
Well, we can deploy and use Ansible to configure machines of any stripe,
Linux, macOS, Windows.
The hosts can be on‑premises, in the cloud, or somewhere in between.
These can be bare metal servers or virtual machines.
If you're thinking, wow, if we are looking to do CM across that big vista,
I hope Ansible has a centralized command and control.
It does.
It's called Red Hat Ansible Automation Controller.
The previous name that you might still see around is Ansible Tower.
And this solution gives you a centralized command and
control REST API and a web user interface,
and it's great for centralized management.
However, this is a fundamentals course,
so I'm leaving that as homework for you to investigate in
the Pluralsight library on your own.
There is a free and open‑source version.
I almost forgot. Red Hat makes its money, number 1, through support agreements.
So you can use Ansible for free.
But if you want priority support, you'll need to arrange that with Red Hat.
Likewise, their automation controller is a licensed product,
but there is a free and open‑source fork of the Ansible
automation controller called Ansible AWX.
Just want to say that for full disclosure.
Let's keep on tracking. The word Ansible, this is just more or less
a fun fact, comes from an old science fiction book from 1966, the
novel Rocannon's World by Ursula LeGuin, where Ansible is a
contraction of Answerable, and it refers to in the book an
instantaneous communication system.
So that's the idea behind the Ansible software.
We have our control node.
Actually, we'll look at the architecture next, so I'll revisit this then.