The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.
Ansible allows much more control over the execution of the playbook by running the tasks in parallel on all hosts. By default, Ansible only fork up to five times, so it will run a particular task on five different machines at once.
In order to complete some configuration tasks, it may be necessary for actions to be taken on a different server than the one being configured. Some examples of this might include an action that requires waiting for the server to be restarted, adding a server to a load balancer or a monitoring server, or making changes to the DHCP or DNS database needed for the server being configured.
Connection types determine how Ansible connects to managed hosts in order to communicate with them. By default, Ansible uses the SSH protocol for remote connection to target nodes. Assuming pipelining is not enabled, Ansible uses this SSH connection to transfer modules and template files, to run remote commands, and to run the plays in the playbook on managed hosts. Thus having a fast, stable, and secure SSH connection is of paramount importance to Ansible. Besides ssh, Ansible offers other connection types which can be used to connect to managedhosts, including paramiko, and local. The connection type can be specified in the Ansible configuration file (ansible.cfg), in the inventory on a host or group basis, inside a playbook, or
on the command-line interface.
Ansible may need access to sensitive data such as passwords or API keys in order to configure remote servers. Normally, this information might be stored as plain text in inventory variables or other Ansible files. But in that case, any user with access to the Ansible files or a version control system which stores the Ansible files would have access to this sensitive data. This poses an
obvious security risk.
Ansible Galaxy is essentially a large public repository of Ansible roles. Roles ship with readmes detailing role use and available variables. Galaxy contains a large number of roles that are constantly evolving and increasing. Galaxy can use git allowing for other role sources such as GitHub.