Using Ansible to orchestrate software installations across multiple instances

So far, we created playbooks that first launched an instance, and then we extended this in the previous recipe to subsequently install Apache onto the running instance. This recipe describes a playbook that can launch any number of instances, and install Apache onto each of those instances.

Getting ready

Ensure that you are logged on to a correctly configured OpenStack client and can access the OpenStack environment that has Ansible installed.

How to do it...

We will extend the previous recipe's playbook to add flexibility to include a variable number of instances.

1. The basic structure was provided in the previous recipe, so the only play we need to adjust is the first one that launches the instances, called Launch instances on OpenStack. This complete play is shown as follows, where we introduce a variable called count, which we have set to 2, and we also introduce the with_sequence section, which forms our loop that...