Ansible is a powerful and flexible deployment toolkit, but that freedom without structure can often leave you swimming in a sea of playbooks that deploy very similar applications.

When building multiple applications that share structure, those applications can share a "meta-playbook" to deploy them - for instance, your Rails applications probably have environment configuration files, an Apache or nGINX virtual host configuration file, and a bundle of gems to be installed. If you have 3 different Rails applications, how many deployment steps are unique to each? Which variables cannot be shared between those applications?

We will walk through designing shared playbooks to reduce the number of lines in your Playbook repository, and show how this simplifies the process of writing a new Playbook for an application.