In Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Ansible, we covered the basics of Ansible and how to use an Ansible Control Host, playbooks, and roles for configuration management of network devices. Ansible, though, has multiple different core operations that can help with orchestrating load balancers, which we will look at in this chapter.
Ansible delegation is a powerful mechanism that means from a playbook or role, Ansible can carry out actions on the target servers specified in the inventory file by connecting to them using SSH or WinRM, or alternately execute commands from the Ansible Control Host. WinRM is the Microsoft remote management standard and the equivalent of SSH for Windows that allows administrators to connect to Windows guests and execute programs.
The following diagram shows these two alternative connection methods with the Ansible Control Host either logging in to boxes using SSH or WinRM to configure them or running...