DevOps / Ansible Interview questions
Which is better and why: linear or free strategy for a large inventory?
Neither is universally better; each optimizes for a different failure mode when hosts vary in speed or reliability.
| linear (default) | free |
| Every host must finish a task before any host moves to the next. | Each host proceeds through tasks independently, as fast as it can. |
| Predictable, easy to reason about ordering across hosts. | Faster overall when host speeds vary significantly. |
| One slow host holds up the entire batch on every task. | Handler timing per host becomes less predictable across the group. |
Choose linear when task ordering across the whole batch matters, for example a coordinated rolling deploy where you need every host at the same step before proceeding, or when predictable, synchronized output is more valuable than raw speed. Choose free when hosts are truly independent of each other and speed varies a lot, for example a large fleet of similar web servers, since a single slow or high-latency host under linear would otherwise stall every other host waiting at each task boundary - free lets fast hosts complete without waiting.
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