Chapter 1. System Architecture and Design of Ansible

This chapter provides a detailed exploration of the architecture and design of how Ansible goes about performing tasks on your behalf. We will cover basic concepts of inventory parsing and how the data is discovered, and then dive into playbook parsing. We will take a walk through module preparation, transportation, and execution. Lastly, we will detail variable types and find out where variables can be located, the scope they can be used for, and how precedence is determined when variables are defined in more than one location. All these things will be covered in order to lay the foundation for mastering Ansible!

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Ansible version and configuration
• Inventory parsing and data sources
• Playbook parsing
• Module transport and execution
• Variable types and locations
• Variable precedence