To follow the examples provided in this book, you will need access to a computer platform capable of running Ansible. Currently, Ansible can be run on any machine with Python 2.7 or Python 3 (versions 3.5 and higher) installed (Windows is supported for the control machine, but only through a Linux distribution running in the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) layer available on newer versions—see Chapter 3, Ansible and Windows - Not Just for Linux, for details). Supported operating systems include (but are not limited to) Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, macOS, and FreeBSD.

This book uses the Ansible 2.7.x.x series release. Ansible installation instructions can be found at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_installation.html.

Some examples use Docker version 1.13.1. Docker installation instructions can be found at https://docs.docker.com/install/.

A handful of examples in this book make use of accounts on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. More information about these services may be found at https://aws.amazon.com and https://azure.microsoft.com respectively. We also delve into management of OpenStack with Ansible, and the examples in this book were tested against a single "all-in-one" instance of Devstack, as per the instructions found here: https://docs.openstack.org/devstack/latest/. 

Finally, the chapter on network device management makes use of Cumulus VX, version 3.7.3, in the example code—please see here for more information: https://cumulusnetworks.com/products/cumulus-vx/.