Creating and managing Ansible inventories is a crucial part of your work with Ansible, and hence we have covered this fundamental concept early in this book. They are vital as without them Ansible would have no knowledge of what hosts it is to run automation tasks against, yet they provide so much more than this. They provide an integration point with configuration management systems, they provide a sensible source for host-specific (or group-specific) variables to be stored, and they provide you with a flexible way of running this playbook.
In this chapter, you learned about creating simple static inventory files and adding hosts to them. We then extended this by learning how to add host groups and assign variables to hosts. We also looked at how to organize your inventories and variables when a single flat inventory file becomes too much to handle. We then learned how...