Creating job templates

This section will go over job template creation. Job templates are the heart of the Automation controller. Everything is built around them, which is one of the reasons they have the most options; at last count, they had almost 40.

Job templates control how playbooks run. They control which hosts are used, variables are included, and the how a job behaves when run. This can seem daunting. However, most of the options are optional; they are knobs to turn and use as needed.

At the same time, a job template is meant to be a template to run the same thing many times. While things such as surveys and variable inputs can change how a particular playbook runs, there is no reason why a playbook can’t be used in multiple job templates.

In Ansible, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same goal. This applies to job templates as well. Throughout this chapter and the next chapter, with workflows and job templates, there are various strategies for...