Deployment and upgrade strategies are a matter of taste. Each strategy comes with distinct advantages and disadvantages. Ansible does not declare an opinion about which is better, and therefore, it is well-suited to perform deployments and upgrades regardless of the strategy. Ansible provides features and design patterns that facilitate a variety of styles with ease. Understanding the nature of each strategy and how Ansible can be tuned for that strategy will empower you to decide on and design deployments for each of your applications. Task controls and built-in variables provide methods to efficiently upgrade large-scale applications, while treating specific tasks carefully.

In this chapter, you learned how to use Ansible to perform in-place upgrades, and some different methodologies for these, including techniques such as expanding and contracting an environment. You...