Inventories provide more than just system names and groupings. Data pertaining to the systems can be passed along as well. This data may include the following:
- Host-specific data to use in templates
- Group-specific data to use in task arguments or conditionals
- Behavioral parameters to tune how Ansible interacts with a system
Variables are a powerful construct within Ansible and can be used in a variety of ways, not just those described here. Nearly every single thing done in Ansible can include a variable reference. While Ansible can discover data about a system during the setup phase, not all data can be discovered. Defining data with the inventory expands this. Note that variable data can come from many different ...
