Practical Ansible 2

Defining plays and tasks

So far when we have worked with playbooks, we have been creating one single play per playbook (which logically is the minimum you can do). However, you can have more than one play in a playbook, and a "play" in Ansible terms is simply a set of tasks (and roles, handlers, and other Ansible facets) associated with a host (or group of hosts). A task is the smallest possible element of a play and is responsible for running a single module with a set of arguments to achieve a specific goal. Of course, in theory, this sounds quite complex, but when backed up by a practical example, it becomes quite simple to understand.

If we refer to our example inventory, this describes a simple two-tier architecture (we've left out the ...