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DevOps / Ansible Interview questions

Explain the execution flow of an Ansible playbook run?

Running ansible-playbook moves through parsing, per-play host resolution, and then a repeated per-task cycle across every play in the file.

flowchart TD A[Parse playbook YAML] --> B[Load inventory and variables] B --> C[For each play: resolve hosts from hosts: pattern] C --> D{gather_facts enabled?} D -- Yes --> E[Run setup module on each host] D -- No --> F[Skip fact gathering] E --> G[Run each task in order] F --> G G --> H[Task result: ok / changed / failed / skipped] H --> I{More tasks in play?} I -- Yes --> G I -- No --> J[Run any notified handlers] J --> K{More plays in playbook?} K -- Yes --> C K -- No --> L[Print play recap summary]

Ansible first parses the whole playbook and inventory, then processes each play in order: it resolves which hosts match the play's hosts: pattern, optionally gathers facts from them, and then executes each task in sequence against all matched hosts (in parallel, up to the fork limit) before moving to the next task. Once every task in a play has run, any handlers that were notified during that play fire, and only then does Ansible move on to the next play in the file. At the very end, it prints the recap - a per-host summary of ok/changed/unreachable/failed counts - giving a final overview of what happened across the entire run.

When do notified handlers typically run relative to a play's tasks?
What does the play recap at the end of a run show?

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