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- In this lesson, we are
going to talk about variables.

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And before we are diving into

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the details of vault
of variables and facts,

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I want to give you an overview

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of how variables are used by talking about

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separating code from
site-specific configuration.

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That's one of the DevOps best practices.

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Ansible itself is all about
configuration as code.

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Let's face it.

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You define your playbooks,

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in your playbooks, in YAML file
you define the configuration

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that you want to enroll
on the managed assets

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in your environment.

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And if you are developing flexible code,

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you should separate site-specific
information from the code

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which will be static.

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We've already seen that a couple of times.

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If in your playbook, you are too specific

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then it's not going to work out well.

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So you need to try to maintain
a certain obstruction level

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in your playbook and to keep
out very specific information.

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If you develop dynamic code

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where your static code is
combined with variables

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that allows you to use
your code on any site

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reduce some minor modifications
in the variables themselves.

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So to provide the
site-specific information,

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variables I use.

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And apart from variables,
Ansible provides facts.

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Well, I'm not even sure

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if I should put it that way,
because effect is a variable.

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The only difference is that variables

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in general are defined by
the system administrator

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and Ansible effects are discovered
on the managed machines.

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So effects are system properties that are

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dynamically discovered, and
you can use them as variables.

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And separating site-specific information

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from static code is also
referred to as decoupling.

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So what does that mean?

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That means that you should
try to develop your playbooks

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in such a way that they
can be used throughout.

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If you want to use them somewhere else,

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the only thing you need to
change is the variables.

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In the next couple of videos,

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we are going to discover how this works.