How to connect to Microsoft Azure or AWS virtual machines and to install softwares through Ansible playbook script
In this blog, I will explain how you can leverage a popular configuration management tool called Ansible to copy files from your local computer to a remote Windows Virtual Machine then to download software and to install softwares through chocolatey. But before getting started, for those who are completely new to Ansible, I will give a little introduction to this tool.
What is Ansible?
Ansible is a suite of software tools that enables infrastructure as code. It is open-source and the suite includes software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionality. Although it is an open source, it is maintained by Red Hat.
There are many configuration management tools out there, such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Puppet, SaltStack, and Chef, but Ansible is definitely a popular one.
Unlike some other configuration management tools like Chef, Ansible is agent-less. What this means is that you just need to provide the way to connect through SSH or RDP to install software through Ansible playbook scripts or Ansible ad-hoc commands.
