Implementing Modern DevOps

Ansible remote facts

Remote facts in Ansible are a way to specify configuration on remote hosts either by an explicit configuration file or by a script that returns data about the server. In general, this feature is very useful for operations such as maintenance, setting up flags that specifically mark the host as out of the pool so that our playbooks have no effect in the hosts.

Take a look at the following command (assuming the inventory from the previous example is present in the folder and the VM is running on Google Cloud Platform):

ansible all -m setup -i inventory --user=root

This will output an enormous amount of data (JSON-formatted data). This data is all the known facts about the remote host, such as the CPU type, machine ID, network ...