Playbooks

A playbook, in the classic sense, is about offensive and defensive plays in football. The players keep a record of the plays (plan of action) in a book, usually in the form of a diagram.

In Ansible, a playbook is a series of ordered steps or instructions for an IT process. Think of a nicely-written instruction manual that can be read and understood by humans and computers alike. 

In the subsequent chapters, all the automation we will focus on regarding security will lead us toward building both simple and complex playbooks. 

This is what an Ansible playbook command looks like:

ansible-playbook -i inventory playbook.yml

Ignore the -i flag for now and notice the extension of the playbook file. 

As stated in http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_intro.html:

"Playbooks are expressed in YAML format (see YAML syntax (http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/YAMLSyntax.html)) and have a minimum of syntax, which intentionally tries to not be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process."