Overview
If provisioning a new server still means SSH-ing in and running commands from a wiki page — or worse, from memory — configuration drift is inevitable, and onboarding a new environment takes days instead of minutes. I build Ansible playbooks that make server configuration repeatable, auditable, and safe to run twice.
What's Included
- Playbook development — idempotent playbooks for provisioning, configuration, and deployment
- Role-based organization — reusable roles instead of one massive playbook, so components can be composed and reused
- Inventory management — dynamic or static inventory structured for your environments (dev/staging/prod)
- Vault-encrypted secrets — Ansible Vault for secrets used in playbooks, so credentials aren't sitting in plaintext in your repo
Our Process
- Current process review — what's manual today, and what documentation (if any) exists to capture it
- Playbook & role design — a structure proposal covering roles, inventory, and secrets handling
- Implementation — playbooks built and tested against real servers, with idempotency verified by running twice
- Handover — documentation on playbook structure and how to extend it for new servers or services
Who This Is For
Teams still provisioning servers by hand or from a runbook of manual steps, or teams with existing Ansible playbooks that have grown unwieldy and need restructuring into reusable roles.
FAQ
Does this work alongside Terraform? Yes — Terraform provisions the infrastructure, Ansible configures what runs on it. That's a common and complementary pairing with Terraform Infrastructure as Code.
What if we're managing Kubernetes, not VMs? Ansible is most valuable for VM-based infrastructure and one-off provisioning tasks; for Kubernetes-native workloads, Production Kubernetes Setup or ArgoCD / GitOps are the better fit.
Can playbooks be run from CI/CD? Yes — playbooks are built to run both locally for testing and from a CI pipeline for automated, auditable execution.