[ornornor]

Ansible is useful but so confusin (to me anyway).

The way I see roles vs playbooks is whether I’m going to reuse it or not.

Roles are more generic playbooks in a sense that I can share with others or across deployments (for example setup a reverse proxy, or install a piece of software with sane, overridable defaults.

I can then use roles within playbooks to tweak the piece of software’s configuration. If it’s a one-off confit/setup then I’ll use a playbook.

I don’t know if it’s the right paradigm (I don’t think it’s explained well and clearly in the docs), but using this rule of thumb has helped me deal with it.

Of course, any role can be a playbook and vice versa since they do the same thing functionally, it’s all about reusability and sharing.

Kinda how you have libraries in software: role = library, playbook = the software you actually want to write.