Ansible Roles

Ansible works very well with supporting a single-file 10,000-line long playbook (please don't actually do that). However, when playbook's grow out of control, Ansible provides a very nice way to break automation into multiple files (as illustrated before using includes). Yet, as we start to grow the number of files we need to include, things can become hairy to manage and maintain. So what is an Ansible developer to do? Roles to the rescue! Ansible roles provide us with a really unique way of dividing out our automation into uniquely defined responsibilities.

In addition to providing configuration management modularization, Ansible roles provide us with a best-practice approach to organizing automation within a playbook and developing reusable solutions. The Ansible roles implementation simply represents an automated, well-structured implementation of an Ansible includes solution (which we discussed in the previous section). This means that the include directives are already...