Ansible Inventory and Playbook

Now that we have Ansible installed, we can move on to the next milestone. We are now going to explore two major features: Ansible inventory, for client host organization, and Ansible playbooks, to demonstrate how to write Ansible play scripts. These two functionalities combined are the foundation for Ansible's automation and orchestration. This chapter will cover how to use Ansible for quick commands or modules. We will also look at how to use its inventory to identify and configure hosts' access and group them either statically or dynamically. Finally, we will introduce Ansible playbook and look at its actions, its handler, and its variables. We will cover the following topics:

• Using simple Ansible commands with manually set hosts
• Setting up our first Ansible static inventory
• Setting up and configuring a group inventory
• Setting up and configuring a dynamic inventory
• Ansible playbook overview and usage
• Ansible playbook best practices
• Advanced Ansible playbook features