Chapter 1: The System Architecture and Design of Ansible
This chapter provides a detailed exploration of the architecture and design of Ansible and how it goes about performing tasks on your behalf. We will cover the basic concepts of inventory parsing and how data is discovered. Then, we will proceed onto playbook parsing. We will take a walk through module preparation, transportation, and execution. Finally, we will detail variable types and find out where variables are located, their scope of use, and how precedence is determined when variables are defined in more than one location. All these things will be covered in order to lay the foundation for mastering Ansible!
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Ansible versions and configurations
- Inventory parsing and data sources
- Playbook parsing
- Execution strategies
- Module transport and execution
- Ansible collections
- Variable types and locations
- Magic variables
- Accessing external data
- Variable precedence (and interchanging this with variable priority ordering)