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Ansible Interview Questions - Intermediate

How to use these interview questions

🧠 Read each question carefully.

Try answering it yourself before expanding the answer to compare with the ideal response.

Level: Intermediate

🟡 Practical Applications & Troubleshooting.

Focus on real-world scenarios, debugging, optimization, and deeper configuration.

1. What is Ansible Galaxy?

A hub for finding, sharing, and reviewing Ansible roles and collections.

You can use the ansible-galaxy command to download roles created by the community or your organization to jump-start your automation.

2. What is the difference between defaults/main.yml and vars/main.yml in a Role?

defaults have the lowest priority; vars have a higher priority.

Variables in defaults/main.yml are intended to be easily overridden by playbooks or inventory variables. Variables in vars/main.yml are harder to override.

3. Explain the difference between include_tasks and import_tasks.

import_tasks is static; include_tasks is dynamic.

  • Import: Processed at playbook parsing time. Tags and conditionals apply to the import itself (and inherited by tasks).
  • Include: Processed at runtime. Great for looping over files or conditional includes based on facts gathered during execution.
4. How do you handle secrets in Ansible?

Using Ansible Vault.

Ansible Vault encrypts sensitive data (passwords, keys) in files or variables using AES256. You can decrypt them at runtime using a password or key file.

5. What are blocks in Ansible and why use them?

Logical groups of tasks utilized for error handling and applying common directives.

You can use block, rescue, and always structure to handle failures (like try-catch in programming). Also useful for applying become: yes or when: to multiple tasks at once.

6. How do you execute tasks in parallel on a single host?

By using async and poll.

Setting async: <seconds> launches the task and allows Ansible to proceed. Setting poll: 0 makes it "fire and forget".

7. What is delegate_to used for?

To execute a task on a host different from the one currently being targeted.

Example: Removing a node from a load balancer (LB) before patching it. You are configuring the app server (target), but the task to update the LB configuration needs to run on the LB host (delegate).

8. What is the Ansible loop keyword (and how does it differ from with_items)?

loop is the modern, standard way to iterate.

with_items is older. While with_* lookups handle flattening implicitly, loop is stricter and expects a list. loop coupled with filters is the recommended approach.

9. How do you run a task only if a file changed in a previous task?

Use a Handler.

If Task A has notify: Restart Service, and Task A reports a "changed" state, the handler "Restart Service" will run at the end of the play.

10. What are Jinja2 filters?

Python functions used in templates to transform data.

Examples: {{ my_list | join(',') }}, {{ my_path | basename }}, {{ password | b64encode }}. They allow dynamic data manipulation inside playbooks and templates.

11. How does Ansible determine variable precedence?

It follows a specific hierarchy.

Roughly: Command line (-e) > Play vars > Host facts > Inventory host_vars > Inventory group_vars > Role defaults. Command line variables always win.

12. What is serial in a playbook?

It controls the number of hosts managed at one time (rolling update batch size).

serial: 5 means "run the play on 5 hosts at a time". If the batch fails, the playbook stops, preventing a bad update from taking down the entire fleet.

13. What is a "Fact" in Ansible?

System information gathered from the target machine.

Examples: IP address, OS version, disk space. Accessed via the ansible_facts variable (e.g., ansible_facts['eth0']['ipv4']['address']).

14. How can you speed up Ansible execution?

Disable fact gathering, use Pipelining, increases forks, and use strategy: free.

  • gather_facts: no (if facts aren't needed).
  • pipelining = True (reduces SSH operations).
  • config forks = 50 (increases parallelism).
  • strategy: free (hosts don't wait for each other).
15. What are "Magic Variables"?

Variables automatically provided by Ansible.

Examples: * hostvars: Access variables of other hosts. * groups: List of all groups and their members. * inventory_hostname: The name of the current host as known by Ansible.

16. How do you debug a variable value during execution?

Using the debug module.

- name: Print variable
  debug:
    var: my_variable
# OR
  debug:
    msg: "The value is {{ my_variable }}"
17. What is the purpose of wait_for module?

To wait for a condition before continuing.

Commonly used to wait for a port to become open (e.g., waiting for SSH to come up after a reboot) or a file to exist.

18. What is an "inventory plugin" vs an "inventory script"?

Plugins are the modern, core-integrated way to fetch inventory.

Plugins (YAML configuration) are generally faster, easier to configure, and better supported than legacy executable scripts (Python/Bash).

19. How do you handle privilege escalation?

Using become: yes.

It allows you to execute tasks as a different user (default is root), typically via sudo. It can be set at the play, block, or task level.

20. What is molecule?

A framework for testing Ansible roles.

It spins up containers (Docker/Podman), runs your role against them, runs verification tests (Testinfra), and then destroys the containers.

🧪 Ready to test yourself?

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