Now we have come to the end of not only the chapter but also our book. I have been trying to think of a way I can sum up Ansible, and I have managed to find it in a tweet (https://twitter.com/laserllama/status/976135074117808129) from Ansible creator Michael DeHaan, who, in response to a technical recruiter, said the following:

That perfectly sums up my experience of Ansible and hopefully yours. Once you know the basics, it is very easy to quickly move on and start to build more and more complex playbooks, which can not only assist with deploying basic code and applications, but also with deploying complex cloud and even physical architectures.

Being able to not only reuse your own roles but have access to a large collection of a community-contributed roles via Ansible Galaxy means you have many examples or quick starting points for your next project. So, you can roll your sleeves up and get stuck in a lot sooner than maybe you would with other tools. Also, if there is something Ansible cannot do, then odds are there is a tool it can be integrated with to provide the missing functionality.

Going back to what we discussed back in Chapter 1, An Introduction to Ansible, being able to define your infrastructure and deployment in code in a repeatable and shareable way that encourages others to contribute to your playbooks should really be the ultimate aim of why you would start to introduce Ansible into your day-to-day workflows. I hope that, through this book, you have started to think of day-to-day tasks where Ansible could help you and save you time.