Inventory

In Ansible, an inventory is a list of hosts that Ansible can connect to and manage. The inventory is a text file that contains information about the hosts and their properties, such as their IP addresses, hostnames, and the groups they belong to.

Ansible uses the inventory to determine which hosts to connect to and to organize them into groups based on their properties. For example, you might have a group of web servers, a group of database servers, and a group of load balancers.

The inventory file can be stored locally on the Ansible control node or can be loaded from an external inventory management system, such as AWS EC2, OpenStack, or a CMDB. Ansible supports several inventory file formats, including INI, YAML, and JSON.

In addition to defining hosts and groups, the inventory can also define variables specific to individual hosts or groups. These variables can be used in playbooks to customize the behavior of tasks depending on the host or group being managed.

The inventory is a fundamental concept in Ansible and is essential for managing hosts and executing tasks in a scalable and organized manner.