Ansible Automation Case Studies & Practical Application 2

Question 1

A company needs to deploy a multi-tier web application across 50 servers where web servers should be configured before app servers. Which Ansible feature best enforces this ordering?

Accepted Answer

Using multiple plays in a single playbook with separate host groups

Answer

Using alphabetical inventory group names

Answer

Defining serial: 1 in the playbook

Answer

Setting gather_facts: false on all plays

Question 2

During a rolling update, one server fails its health check after the new app version is deployed. Which Ansible mechanism automatically stops the rolling update and prevents further hosts from being updated?

Accepted Answer

The max_fail_percentage option combined with serial

Answer

The ignore_errors directive

Answer

Setting force_handlers: true

Answer

Using the rescue block in tasks

Question 3

A security team requires that database passwords used in playbooks are never stored in plain text in version control. What is the recommended Ansible solution?

Accepted Answer

Use Ansible Vault to encrypt sensitive variables

Answer

Store passwords in environment variables only

Answer

Base64-encode all passwords in group_vars

Answer

Use a separate untracked vars file with no_log: true

Question 4

An ops engineer wants to test a new playbook against production inventory without making any actual changes. Which command-line flag achieves this?

Accepted Answer

--check

Answer

--syntax-check

Answer

--list-tasks

Answer

--diff

Question 5

A team manages 200 servers split across prod and staging environments in different data centers. They need per-environment variable overrides. What is the best practice for organizing this?

Accepted Answer

Use group_vars directories named after each inventory group

Answer

Create separate playbooks for each environment

Answer

Pass all variables via -e on the command line

Answer

Hardcode environment values inside each role's defaults/main.yml

Question 6

A playbook task must only run when a specific file exists on the remote host. Which approach correctly implements this conditional?

Accepted Answer

Using stat module to check the file, then when: stat_result.stat.exists

Answer

Using when: ansible_facts['file'] is defined

Answer

Using the file module with state: exists

Answer

Setting creates: /path/to/file in the task args

Question 7

A SysAdmin needs to update the same nginx.conf template on 300 servers but only restart nginx if the config actually changed. Which Ansible feature handles this automatically?

Accepted Answer

Using a handler that is notified by the template task

Answer

Setting changed_when: false on the template task

Answer

Adding a debug task after the template task

Answer

Using register to capture output and then shell: systemctl restart nginx