From Zero to Production: Deploying Applications on Azure with Ansible and Terraform

There's a point in every DevOps engineer's journey where things start to click. This week was that moment for me. Five assignments, one Azure subscription, and a whole lot of terminal output later — I now understand why teams reach for Ansible the moment they need to configure more than one server. This post walks through everything I built this week: setting up a production-ready Ansible workstation, automating a fleet of 4 Azure VMs with ad-hoc commands, deploying a static website with a multi-play playbook, and finally deploying two applications using Terraform + Ansible together — including a production-grade role-based setup. Assignment 1: Building a Production-Ready Ansible Workstation Before touching a single server, real teams standardise their local environment. That means isolated dependencies, consistent editor settings, and automated quality checks that run before every commit. The first thing I did was create an isolated Python virtual environment: python3 -m venv .venv &&