Summary

Collections are now a vitally important part of Ansible’s overall architecture, and they provide an easy and effective mechanism for all code to be distributed and managed on control nodes everywhere. Learning about collections is vital to your understanding of the architecture of any modern version of Ansible, and armed with this information, you can manage, build, and maintain collections on your control nodes, even contributing them back to the community if you so desire.

In this chapter, you learned about the history of collections, how they came about, and why they are so important to Ansible. You then learned how to reference objects from within collections using FQCNs, before moving on to learning about the installation and management of collections on your control node. Finally, we looked at the process involved in building, installing, and testing your own collection, such that you can progress to contributing collections to the wider Ansible community if...