Chapter 10: Extending Ansible

It must be said that Ansible takes the kitchen sink approach to functionality and tries to provide, out of the box, every piece of functionality you might ever need. With the ansible-core package and its associated collections, there are almost 6,000 modules available for use within Ansible at the time of writing – compare that to the (roughly) 800 that were included when the second edition of this book was published! In addition to these, there is a rich plugin and filter architecture with numerous callback plugins, lookup plugins, filter plugins, and dynamic inventory plugins included. Now, collections provide a whole new vector through which new functionality can be provided.

Despite this, there will always be cases where Ansible doesn't quite perform the tasks required, especially in large and complex environments, or ones where bespoke in-house systems have been developed. Luckily, the design of Ansible, coupled with its open source...