This book is a primer for anyone who has conceptual knowledge of Ansible and would like to get started writing Ansible playbooks to automate common infrastructure tasks, orchestrate application deployments, and/or manage configurations across multiple environments. This book follows an incremental approach, starting with the basics such as learning about the anatomy of a playbook and writing simple roles to create modular code. Once comfortable with the basics, you will be introduced to primitives such as adding dynamic data with variables and templates, and controlling execution flow with conditionals and iterators. This is then followed by more advanced topics such as node discovery, clustering, encrypting data, and managing environments. We conclude with the discussion on the orchestration features of Ansible. Let's begin our journey towards being an Ansible practitioner by learning about playbooks.
In this chapter, we will learn about:
The anatomy of a playbook
What plays are and how to write a Hosts inventory and search patterns
Ansible modules and the batteries-included approach