Ansible Automation Technology & Digital Applications 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the function of the 'serial' keyword in an Ansible playbook?
- Controls how many hosts are updated at a time in a rolling deployment (Correct answer)
- Runs tasks sequentially instead of in parallel
- Sets the order of variable precedence
- Limits the number of forks
Correct answer: Controls how many hosts are updated at a time in a rolling deployment
The serial keyword enables rolling updates by specifying how many hosts (as a number or percentage) are processed per batch before moving to the next.
Question 2: Which Ansible feature allows you to test playbook syntax without executing any tasks on remote hosts?
- --syntax-check flag (Correct answer)
- --dry-run flag
- --validate flag
- --no-exec flag
Correct answer: --syntax-check flag
The --syntax-check flag parses the playbook and checks for YAML and Ansible syntax errors without connecting to or modifying any hosts.
Question 3: What does Ansible Molecule primarily provide for role developers?
- A testing framework for Ansible roles and collections (Correct answer)
- A GUI for managing playbooks
- A module for molecule/chemical data
- A linting tool for YAML files
Correct answer: A testing framework for Ansible roles and collections
Molecule provides a framework for testing Ansible roles by spinning up infrastructure (Docker, VMs), running playbooks, and verifying the resulting state.
Question 4: In Ansible, what is a 'fact cache' used for?
- Storing gathered facts to disk so they can be reused across playbook runs (Correct answer)
- Caching downloaded modules locally
- Storing task results in memory during a play
- Persisting handler notifications between runs
Correct answer: Storing gathered facts to disk so they can be reused across playbook runs
Fact caching stores gathered host facts to a backend (JSON files, Redis, etc.) so subsequent playbook runs can use cached facts without re-gathering them.
Question 5: Which network automation feature allows Ansible to build device configurations from templates?
- Jinja2 templates with network modules (Correct answer)
- NETCONF only
- SSH config files
- Ansible Galaxy templates
Correct answer: Jinja2 templates with network modules
Ansible uses Jinja2 templates combined with network-specific modules (like cisco.ios.ios_config) to render and push device configurations.
Question 6: What is the difference between 'include_tasks' and 'import_tasks' in Ansible?
- include_tasks is dynamic (runtime), import_tasks is static (parse time) (Correct answer)
- import_tasks is dynamic, include_tasks is static
- They are identical with different syntax
- include_tasks only works in roles
Correct answer: include_tasks is dynamic (runtime), import_tasks is static (parse time)
import_tasks is processed at playbook parse time (static), while include_tasks is evaluated at runtime (dynamic), allowing conditional inclusion based on variables.
Question 7: Which Ansible connection plugin enables managing network devices that don't support Python?
- network_cli (Correct answer)
- ssh_raw
- paramiko
- netconf
Correct answer: network_cli
The network_cli connection plugin allows Ansible to manage network devices via CLI over SSH without requiring Python on the remote device.
Ansible Automation Technology & Digital Applications 3
What is the function of the 'serial' keyword in an Ansible playbook?