Ansible Automation Case Studies & Practical Application 5

Question 1

A newly onboarded team member runs a playbook and gets 'UNREACHABLE' for several hosts. The SSH keys are correctly distributed. What is the most likely next step to diagnose the issue?

Accepted Answer

Run with -vvv to get verbose SSH connection details

Answer

The -vvv flag enables verbose output including the exact SSH command and error, making it the fastest way to diagnose connection failures.

Question 2

An organization runs Ansible playbooks nightly to enforce server compliance. After a manual change on a server, the next nightly run should detect and correct the drift. Which type of Ansible task design enables this?

Accepted Answer

Idempotent tasks using declarative Ansible modules that enforce desired state

Answer

Declarative Ansible modules compare current state to desired state and apply only the changes needed, correcting configuration drift automatically.

Question 3

A playbook uses delegate_to to run a task on localhost while iterating over remote hosts. What is a common use case for this pattern?

Accepted Answer

Registering a remote host into a load balancer from the control node during deployment

Answer

delegate_to: localhost is commonly used to call an API or CLI tool on the control node (e.g., deregistering a host from a load balancer) as part of a per-host deployment loop.

Question 4

A playbook creates an EC2 instance and then immediately tries to SSH into it. The connection fails because the instance isn't ready yet. What is the correct Ansible approach to handle this?

Accepted Answer

Use the wait_for module to poll port 22 until the instance is reachable

Answer

The wait_for module polls a host and port until connectivity is confirmed, providing a reliable way to wait for instance readiness.

Question 5

A development team wants to test Ansible roles against multiple OS versions (Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, RHEL 8, RHEL 9) in isolation before promoting to production. Which tool is purpose-built for this?

Accepted Answer

Molecule, which spins up container or VM instances per scenario

Answer

Molecule is the standard Ansible role testing framework, supporting multiple driver backends to test roles against different platforms automatically.

Ansible Automation Practice Test

Ansible Automation Practice Test

Ansible Automation Case Studies & Practical Application 5