Introduction

Objective

The objective of this chapter is to connect Ansible to a cloud platform.

Steps

1. Choose the connection method.
2. Create environment variables.
3. Verify connection to the cloud platform.

Cloud integration

Cloud computing has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Cloud providers help abstract the complexities of managing and securing our own data centers. The pay-as-you-go model helps reduce the costs and shifts focus to the more important areas.

A common misconception is that clouds are merely servers, but there is much more going on under the hood. To name a few things, we have:

• Security Groups.
• Role-based Access Control.
• Networking

We will look at these in quite some detail in the next few chapters.

The question arises, “How does Ansible help us in all this?” The answer is; Ansible provides a wide range of modules to deploy and manage cloud infrastructure. All the major cloud providers have exposed API endpoints to interact with their services. Ansible uses them in its modules internally to save us the pain of going through them ourselves.

This API-driven management is what makes cloud computing so powerful.