Real-world examples

Before we finish the chapter, and also the book, I thought I would give a few examples of how I am using Ansible and interacting with Ansible: the first is interacting with Ansible using chat.

The chat example

A few months ago, I needed to set up a demo to show automation working—however, I needed to be able to show the demo on my laptop or phone, which meant that I couldn't assume I had access to the command line.

The demo I came up with ended up using Slack and a few other tools that we haven't covered in this book, namely Hubot and Jenkins; before I go into any details, let's quickly have a look at the output of the demo running:

As you can see from the preceding output, I asked the following in a Slack channel:

@bot give me a linux server

This then triggered an Ansible playbook run, which launched an instance in AWS and returned information on the instance once the playbook had confirmed that the server was available on the network. I also configured it to remove all running...