Ansible Interview Questions and Answers

Ansible tower provided by Red Hat or Ansible, both are in the N2 and automation platform which has the capability to provide a number of features.

Its complete functionality includes-

• Provision of components
• Deploying the applications
• Orchestrating workflow
• Managing its systems and infrastructure
• Configuration of systems
• Networking and other applications

Ansible playbook is the actual building block supporting all of the use cases of the Ansible tool. The variety in YAML tags are divided into four major types which are known as-

• Declaration
• Vars
• Tasks
• Handlers

Ansible playbooks are also a combined set of commands that has the capability to perform huge tasks and they are also written in YAML file format.

The web-based solution which makes Ansible an easy task for the IT professionals or teams associated with any project an easy task to operate is Ansible tower. Ansible tower is designed to act as half for the automation tasks and it is free for its uses up to 10 nodes.

This Ansible interview question comes under the advanced segment.

Ansible modules are idempotent which means it professionals can perform the task of RESTful service standpoint for idempotent operations. In this condition various identical requests became a single request end-user can create its own modules in Ansible.

There are two types of models present in Ansible-

• Core modules: This type of module is managed by the Ansible team and they always ship with its software. The highest priority is given to this module as compared to other modules.
• Extras modules: Currently these models are bundled with Ansible but maybe they will be available separately in the future. Mostly they are managed and organized by the Ansible community.

Ansible fact is a way for tools to get data and complete information about a host and store them in the variables for their easy access. This information is stored in predefined variables that are available for use in the playbook. To generate the facts and simple techniques the setup module is as-

$ Ansible- m setup hostname

As soon as the statement gets executed it will print out a list of a dictionary of the facts which are available for a particular host. This is the way to access the list of available Ansible_variables. These facts can be seen as-

$ Ansible all- m setup

If a user wants to extract any particular part of the available information then the "set up" model can be used where an option is available to filter out the output and the facts which are required can behold.

The Ansible files can be made reusable in following ways-

• Include
• Role
• Import

In order to break or create the number of smaller files of any huge playbook imports and includes are used. Rolls are used to organize and manage multiple tasks following a package including plugin, variables, handlers and other modules. By using Ansible galaxy they can also be uploaded and shared directly.

• Playbook: playbook is referred to as a code file that is written in YAML format. It contains the essential tasks requires to be implemented.
• Task: Task represents a single procedure that is required to be executed.
• Play: Play refers to a task is executed from beginning to end or execution of a playbook.