The cloud is a popular but vague term, used to describe IaaS. There are many types of resources that can be provided by a cloud, although the most commonly discussed are compute and storage. Ansible is capable of interacting with numerous cloud providers, in order to discover, create, or otherwise manage resources within them. Note that although we will focus on the compute and storage resources in this chapter, Ansible has a modules for interacting with many more cloud resource types, such as load balancers, and even cloud role-based access controls.

One such cloud provider that Ansible can interact with is OpenStack (an open source cloud operating system), and this is a likely solution for those with a need for on-premise IaaS functionality. A suite of services provides interfaces to manage compute, storage, and networking services, plus many other...