Automation is the ability to orchestrate and integrate tools, people, and processes through a workflow. In this Learning Path, we will look at the most popular tools for automation their advantages, and how to automate effectively with each one of them. We'll cover the why and how of Ansible, Puppet, and Salt, in a step-by-step, progressive manner. Initially, we focus on Ansible. You will learn how to manage environments and implement strategies in Ansible and be introduced to Ansible Galaxy and Tower, which are Ansible's enterprise tooling for supporting large-scale infrastructure. We then move on to learning Puppet. Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations. Using Puppet you can control each Puppet agent in a network. You will learn how to do so by first understanding the Puppet ecosystem and then detailed topics such as configuration and management of Puppet servers, environments, module repositories, and reusable modules. With Salt too, we use a similar approach. We start from the basics, such as installing, configuring, deploying, and managing a web application to advanced concepts like Docker containers across multiple systems behind a HAProxy load balancer.