In our first chapter, we are going to be looking at the technology world before tools such as Ansible came into existence in order to get an understanding of why Ansible was needed.
Before we start to talk about Ansible, let's quickly discuss the old world. I have been working with servers, mostly ones that serve web pages, since the late 90s, and the landscape is unrecognizable. To give you an idea of how I used to operate my early servers, here is a quick overview of my first few years running servers.
Like most people at the time, I started with a shared hosting account where I had very little control over anything on the server side when the site I was running at the time outgrew shared hosting. I moved to ...
