To demonstrate how playbooks work, the following example will show a small playbook that also makes use of the variables we configured earlier:

- hosts: mon1 osd1
tasks:
- name: Echo Variables
debug: msg="I am a {{ a_variable }}"

Now run the playbook. Note the command to run a playbook that differs from running ad hoc Ansible commands:

    $ ansible-playbook /etc/ansible/playbook.yml

The preceding command gives the following output:

The output shows the playbook being executed on both mon1 and osd1 as they are in groups, which are children of the parent group ceph. Also, note how the output is different between the two servers as they are picking up the variables that you set earlier in the group_vars directory.

Finally, the last couple of lines show the overall run status of the playbook run. You can now destroy your Vagrant environment again, ready for the next section:

    vagrant destroy --force

This concludes the introduction to Ansible, but it is not a complete guide. It's recommended that you should explore other resources to gain a more in-depth knowledge of Ansible before using it in a production environment.