Summary

Creating and managing Ansible inventories is a crucial part of your work with Ansible, and hence we have covered this fundamental concept early in this book. They are vital as without them Ansible would have no knowledge of what hosts it is to run automation tasks against, yet they provide so much more than this. They provide an integration point with configuration management systems, they provide a sensible source for host-specific (or group-specific) variables to be stored, and they provide you with a flexible way of running this playbook. 

In this chapter, you learned about creating simple static inventory files and adding hosts to them. We then extended this by learning how to add host groups and assign variables to hosts. We also looked at how to organize your inventories and variables when a single flat inventory file becomes too much to handle. We then learned how to make use of dynamic inventory files, before concluding with a look at useful tips and tricks such as combining inventory sources and using patterns to specify hosts, all of which will make how you work with inventories easier and yet simultaneously more powerful.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to develop playbooks and roles to configure, deploy, and manage remote machines using Ansible.