In this chapter, we will see how to use Ansible for provisioning infrastructures in a matter of minutes. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting and powerful capabilities of Ansible, since it allows you to recreate environments in a quick and consistent way. This is very important when you have multiple environments for the various stages of your deployment pipeline. In fact, it allows you to create equal environments and to keep them aligned when you need to make changes without any pain.

Letting Ansible provision your machines also has other advantages, and for those reasons I always suggest doing the following:

• Audit trail: In the last few years, the IT sector has swallowed a huge number of other sectors, and, as a consequence of this, the auditing processes are now looking at IT as a critical part of the process. When an auditor comes to the IT department...