An introduction to playbooks

Normally in IT, a playbook is a set of instructions run by someone when something happens; a little vague, I know, but stay with me. These range from everything to building and configuring new server instances, to how to deploy code updates and how to deal with problems when they occur.

In the traditional sense, a playbook is typically a collection of scripts or instructions for a user to follow and, while they are meant to introduce consistency and conformity across systems, even with the best intentions, this is almost never the case.

This is where Ansible comes in. Using an Ansible playbook, you are basically saying apply these changes and commands against these sets of hosts rather than someone having to log ...

Get Learn Ansible now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.