Inventory plugins are bits of code that will create inventory data for an Ansible execution. In many environments, the simple ini file-style inventory source and variable structure is not sufficient to represent the actual infrastructure being managed. In such cases, a dynamic inventory source is desired, one that will discover the inventory and data at runtime at every execution of Ansible. A number of these dynamic sources ship with Ansible, primarily to operate Ansible with the infrastructure built into one cloud computing platform or another. A short, incomplete list of dynamic inventory plugins that ship with Ansible (there are now over 20) includes the following:
- apache-libcloud
- cobbler
- console_io
- digital_ocean
- docker
- ec2
- gce
- libvirt_lxc
- linode
- openshift
- openstack
- rax
- vagrant
- vmware
- windows_azure
An inventory plugin is essentially an...
