Communication & Stakeholder Relations Flashcards

A new stakeholder is confused about the difference between Ansible roles and regular playbooks. How do you best explain roles?

Answer: Roles are reusable, self-contained units of automation that can be shared across multiple playbooks and projects

Ansible roles package tasks, variables, files, and handlers into a reusable structure that promotes consistency and code reuse across projects.

A security stakeholder asks how Ansible communicates with managed nodes and whether that communication is encrypted. What is the standard answer?

Answer: Ansible connects to Linux nodes via SSH (encrypted by default) and Windows nodes via WinRM

Ansible uses SSH for Linux systems and WinRM for Windows, both of which provide encrypted communication channels by default.

A stakeholder asks why some Ansible tasks show 'skipped' in the output. What is the correct explanation?

Answer: Tasks were skipped because their 'when' condition evaluated to false for those hosts

The 'when' conditional directive causes Ansible to skip tasks on hosts where the specified condition is not met.

After a major automation initiative, stakeholders request a metrics dashboard showing automation coverage and job success rates. Which tool provides this natively?

Answer: Ansible Automation Platform's Analytics and Reporting dashboards

AAP's built-in Analytics feature provides dashboards showing job trends, host counts, automation savings, and success/failure rates over time.

A project team wants to ensure stakeholders can trigger approved Ansible jobs without needing CLI access or playbook knowledge. What AAP feature enables this?

Answer: Survey forms on workflow and job templates that present a user-friendly interface for parameterized job execution

AAP survey forms let stakeholders launch complex automation by filling out simple forms without needing to understand the underlying playbook code.

A team adopting Ansible asks how to communicate infrastructure state to remote teams without granting system access. What approach best serves this need?

Answer: Publish Ansible facts and job reports to a shared dashboard or centralized CMDB

Pushing Ansible facts and job summaries to a CMDB or dashboard provides stakeholders a live view of infrastructure state without requiring direct access.

A change advisory board (CAB) requests that all Ansible playbooks affecting production be peer-reviewed before use. What process supports this requirement?

Answer: Requiring playbook changes to go through pull requests in Git with mandatory reviewer approvals

Git pull request workflows with required approvals enforce peer review of playbook changes before they can be merged and deployed to production.