Learning Ansible 2 - Second Edition

Working with playbooks

Playbooks are one of the core features of Ansible and tell Ansible what to execute. They are like a to-do list for Ansible that contains a list of tasks; each task internally links to a piece of code called a module. Playbooks are simple, human-readable YAML files, whereas modules are a piece of code that can be written in any language with the condition that its output be in the JSON format. You can have multiple tasks listed in a playbook and these tasks would be executed serially by Ansible. You can think of playbooks as an equivalent of manifests in Puppet, states in Salt, or cookbooks in Chef; they allow you to enter a list of tasks or commands you want to execute on your remote system.

Studying the anatomy of a playbook ...