Our previous example imagined a single-use, short-lived cloud server. What if we want to create and use long-lived cloud servers, instead? Walking through the tasks of creating them and adding them to the temporary inventory each time we want to touch them seems inefficient. Manually recording the server details into a static inventory also seems inefficient, and also error-prone. Thankfully, there is a better way: using the cloud itself as a dynamic inventory source.
Ansible ships with a number of dynamic inventory scripts for cloud providers, as we discussed in Chapter 1, The System Architecture and Design of Ansible. We'll continue our examples here with OpenStack. To recap, the Ansible source repository ...
