Ansible Playbook Essentials

Chapter 2. Going Modular with Ansible Roles

In the last chapter, you learned about writing a simple playbook with Ansible. You also learned about the concepts of plays which map hosts to tasks. Writing tasks in a single playbook may work fine for a very simple setup. However, if we have multiple applications spanning across number of hosts, this will quickly become unmanageable.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to the following concepts:

• What makes a role and what are roles used for?
• How to create roles to provide abstraction?
• Organizing content to provide modularity
• Using include statements
• Writing simple tasks and handlers
• Installing packages, managing services, and serving files with Ansible modules

Understanding roles

In real-life scenarios, ...