Summary

This chapter introduced Site, Ansible roles, how to create and version them, and how to use the Ansible tooling to ensure productivity and reusability.

Configuration management

We started by introducing configuration management as a system engineering process to establish and maintain the consistency of your infrastructure through automation.

Configuration changes flow through a system in response to the following events:

• A new machine has been deployed.
• A configuration modification has been requested.
• Validation of the current configuration is required.

Site

Site is a term used in Ansible’s documentation to define an application’s holistic configuration, service, or environment.

You created a site.yml file to centralize your automation configurations. To reuse the existing playbooks, you used the import_playbook method.

Ansible roles

We introduced Ansible roles because they simplify writing complex playbooks by breaking them into multiple files and providing a framework for developing a fully independent collection of variables, tasks, files, templates, and modules.

We looked into the role directory layout that Ansible recognizes;