Chapter 10. Orchestrating Infrastructure with Ansible

Orchestration can mean different things at different times when used in different scenarios. The following are some of the orchestration scenarios described:

• Running ad hoc commands in parallel on a group of hosts, for example, using a for loop to walk over a group of web servers to restart the Apache service. This is the crudest form of orchestration.
• Invoking an orchestration engine to launch another configuration management tool to enforce correct ordering.
• Configuring a multitier application infrastructure in a certain order with the ability to have fine-grained control over each step, and the flexibility to move back and forth while configuring multiple components. For example, installing the database, setting up the web server, coming back to the database, creating a schema, going to web servers to start services, and more.

Most real-world scenarios are similar to the last scenario, which involve a multitier application stacks...