Configuration Management for Sysadmins

Your servers work, but only because a few people remember how they were built. This book turns that memory into text you can review, test and run again. Using agentless automation over SSH and a small fictional online shop as the running example, it shows how to write playbooks, make tasks safe to repeat, organise inventories for production and staging, package behaviour into roles, keep secrets encrypted, and build a server from a bare machine without logging in to click or type by hand. You will also learn how to test changes before they reach production, roll them out in batches, and spot drift when someone edits a server directly. The final chapter rebuilds the whole shop from scratch, and the Quick Reference adds checklists, a cheat sheet, troubleshooting tips and review questions.