Summary

Ansible has many advanced features that allow you to run your playbooks in a variety of scenarios, whether that is upgrading a cluster of servers in a controlled manner; working with devices on a secure, isolated network; or controlling your playbook flow with prompts and tags. Ansible has been adopted by a large and ever-growing user base and, as such, is designed and evolved around solving real-world problems. Most of the advanced features of Ansible we discussed are centered around exactly this—solving real-world problems.

In this chapter, you learned about running tasks asynchronously in Ansible, before looking at the various features available for running playbooks to upgrade a cluster, such as running tasks on small batches of inventory hosts, failing a play early if a certain percentage of hosts fail, delegating tasks to a specific host, and even running tasks once, regardless of your inventory (or batch) size. You also learned about the difference between...