Advanced Ansible Topics

Up to this point, we have worked hard to give you a solid foundation in Ansible so that, whatever your desired automation task, you can implement it with ease and confidence. However, when you really start to ramp up your automation, how do you ensure that you can handle any condition that arises in a graceful manner? For example, how can you ensure that when you have to initiate long-running actions, you can run them asynchronously and come back to them to check on the results reliably later? Or, if you are updating a large group of servers, how can you ensure that the play fails early if a handful of servers suffer failures? The last thing you want to do is to roll out a broken update (let’s face it, problems do occur with everyone’s code from time to time) across 100 servers—far better to detect that a small percentage have failed and abort the entire play on this basis than attempt to continue and break an entire load-balanced cluster...