We will first install Ansible on our computer; next, we will create an EC2 instance that will let us illustrate the basic usage of Ansible. After that, we will work on recreating the Hello World Node.js application by creating and executing what Ansible calls a playbook. We will then look at how Ansible can run in pull mode, which offers a new approach to deploying changes. Finally, we will look at replacing the UserData block in our CloudFormation template with Ansible to combine the benefits of both CloudFormation and our configuration management system.
Ansible is fairly easy to use and well documented across the web. This book will cover enough to get you started and up to speed on simple configurations such as the one we need in our examples, but you might be interested in spending a bit more time learning about Ansible to be really efficient with it.