Building Ansible inventories

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Welcome to the guide to building Ansible inventories. An inventory is a list of managed nodes, or hosts, that Ansible deploys and configures. This guide introduces you to inventories and covers the following topics:

  • Creating inventories to track a list of servers and devices that you want to automate.

  • Using dynamic inventories to track cloud services with servers and devices that are constantly starting and stopping.

  • Using patterns to automate specific sub-sets of an inventory.

  • Expanding and refining the connection methods Ansible uses for your inventory.