As mentioned at the start of the chapter, using a traditional Linux tool such as Ansible on Windows always feels a little strange. However, I am sure you will agree that the experience is as Linux-like as possible. When I first started experimenting with the Windows modules, I was surprised that I managed to launch an EC2 Windows Server instance and managed to deploy a simple web application without ever having to remote-desktop into the target instance.

With each new release, Ansible gets more and more support for Windows-based hosts, making it easy to manage mixed workloads from your playbooks.

In the next chapter, we are going to return to more familiar territory, for me at least, and look at how we can harden our Linux installation.