Learning DevOps: Continuously Deliver Better Software

Restarting services using Ansible

Now that we have defined our inventory, we are ready to use Ansible to perform actions. Arguably, one of the most important adhoc actions you can take is to restart services on target nodes. At first, this might seem a bit of an overkill compared to simply logging on to the server and doing it, but when you realize that this action can be scaled anywhere from one to one million servers, its power becomes apparent.

Getting ready

You'll need an inventory file before you try this, so if you have not got it already, go ahead and set one up. The following examples are based on the inventory set out in the preceding recipe, so you'll need to change the examples to match your environments.

How to do it…

To restart a service, ...