As Ansible is agentless, unlike other configuration management platforms, it only requires a master node installation. Ansible is also particularly light due to its lack of daemons, database reliance, and keep-on-running services.

Following our introduction to Ansible, we are now going to look at different ways of installing Ansible in your environment, such as bare-metal, in the cloud, and the use of Docker containers. We will also look at how to install Ansible on multiple Linux operating systems, both from a package manager and from the source. Finally, we will look at how to prepare and configure a host so that it is Ansible-controllable. This chapter will cover the following:

• Ansible master nodes and basic Linux installation
• Ansible container setup
• Ansible source installation
• Ansible AWS instance setup
• Ansible configuration
• Ansible configuration on Linux and Windows clients