Creating an inventory
Inventories are where hosts are stored in the Automation controller. A host is anything that a task in a job template or playbook can act upon. It can be a Linux machine, a Windows virtual machine (VM), a router, or even something that is accessible only with a HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) application programming interface (API) endpoint. A collection of hosts is known as a group. A host doesn’t need to belong to a group, but it can belong to multiple groups. In addition, inventories, groups, and hosts can also have variables attached that can be picked when a job is run. Each inventory is separate from other inventories, and only one can be used in a job at a time.
A feature of inventories is that they can be populated with sources. These sources range from INItialization (INI) or YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML) files to Python plugins. They can populate groups, hosts, and variables as well. This is the recommended way of populating inventories...
