4 lines of code to improve your Ansible play

Out in the blogosphere, which sings the virtues of infrastructure-as-code, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, code reviews, and testing regimes, it is easy to forget that such a well-engineered ivory tower is an ideal, not a reality. Imperfect systems haunt us, but we must ship something. There are few towers less ivory than those created by gluing together APIs in the course of system automation. It is a brittle world. The pressures are enormous to get it “working,” get it shipped, and move on.