There is rarely one playbook that will suit an entire infrastructure, and although it is easy to tell Ansible to use an alternate inventory for a different playbook, this could get very messy, very quickly, with potentially hundreds of small inventory files dotted around your network. You can imagine how quickly this would get unmanageable, and Ansible is supposed to make things more manageable, not the opposite. One possible simple solution to this is to start adding groups into your inventories.
Let's assume you have a simple three-tier web architecture, with multiple hosts in each tier for high availability and/or load balancing. The three tiers in this architecture might be the following:
- Frontend servers
- Application ...
