Scheduling and automation tools enable us to automate tasks such as continuous integration and continuous delivery. They are able to do this by providing the following fairly standard services:
- A web-based UI we can use to configure them
- Usually, a REST-based API so that we can use their features programmatically
- The ability to authenticate against its local store or possibly another service (OAuth/Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML))
- They all fundamentally give us a clear way to automate tasks to suit our workflow
Most security-related automation does boil down to doing a similar task over and over again and looking at the differences. This is especially true when you are in the line of doing security operations and security assessments.
Remember that by using Ansible roles and the playbooks containing...
