Practical Ansible 2

Organizing your automation code

As you can imagine, if you were to write all of your required Ansible tasks in one massive playbook, it would quickly become unmanageable—that is to say, it would be difficult to read, difficult for someone else to pick up and understand, and—most of all—difficult to debug when things go wrong. Ansible provides a number of ways for you to divide your code into manageable chunks; perhaps the most important of these is the use of roles. Roles (for the sake of a simple analogy) behave like a library in a conventional high-level programming language. We will go into more detail about roles in Chapter 4, Playbooks and Roles.

There are, however, other ways that Ansible supports splitting your code into manageable ...