Ansible (best) practices

Ansible, like Git, aims to be a simple tool.
The benefit here is that the level of abstraction that Ansible offers is paper-thin, with no complicated workflows, or opinions enforced by the tool itself.
The downside is that without a prescribed approach to Ansible, developing your playbooks often becomes a case of trial-and-error.

As engineers steeped in the DevOps mindset we must be able to use the tool effectively, allowing us to accelerate and shorten the lead time from development to production.

In this session we will take a look at some lessons learned when working with Ansible. Topics covered:

• Variables, variable lookup precedence, and the best way to use variables in your Ansible scripts
• Setting up Ansible to work locally, allowing for faster development, iteration and testing
• Laying out your inventory files, and positioning them to work best with group_vars and host_vars
• Thinking about the “hierarchy” of your infrastructure, and how best to use Ansible to reflect that hierarchy