Ansible allows you to define policies, configurations, task sequences, and orchestration steps in playbooks—the limit is really only your imagination. A playbook can be executed to manage your tasks either synchronously or asynchronously on a remote machine, although you will find that most examples are synchronous. In this section, you will learn about the main components of Ansible and understand how Ansible employs those components to communicate with remote hosts.
In order to understand the various components, we first need an inventory to work from. Let's create an example one, ideally with multiple hosts in it—this could be the same as the one you created in the previous section. As discussed in ...
