Summary

We completed a whirlwind tour of some IT automation and scheduler software. Our main aim was to introduce the software and highlight some of its common features. 

These features include the following:

• Offering encryption for our secrets
• Running as per our schedule requirements
• The ability to get good reports 

We already know about Ansible roles that allow us to reuse and create great playbooks. Coupled with these features, we have a complete automation system ready. Not only we will be able to run our tasks and jobs as many times as we like, we will get updates on how they ran. Also, since our tasks run on protected servers, it is important that the secrets we share for them to run are safe as well.

In the next chapter, we move away from thinking about the mechanics of Ansible automation to squarely thinking about security automation in specific situations. Automating our server's patches is the most obvious, and possibly popular, requirement. We will apply security automation techniques and approaches to set up a hardened WordPress and enable encrypted backups.