Strategies

In 2.0 we added a new way to control play execution, strategy, by default plays will still run as they used to, with what we call the linear strategy. All hosts will run each task before any host starts the next task, using the number of forks (default 5) to parallelize.

The serial directive can ‘batch’ this behaviour to a subset of the hosts, which then run to completion of the play before the next ‘batch’ starts.

A second strategy ships with ansible free, which allows each host to run until the end of the play as fast as it can.:

- hosts: all
  strategy: free
  tasks:
  ...

Strategy Plugins

The strategies are implemented via a new type of plugin, this means that in the future new execution types can be added, either locally by users or to Ansible itself by a code contribution.

One example is debug strategy. See Playbook Debugger for details.