Ansible playbooks use information about hosts, groups, and other configuration data. This type of information is typically stored in Git repositories. We discuss the pros and cons of using OpenLDAP directories as data store for Ansible data.

The presentation covers the possibilities offered by standard LDAP schema definitions for this purpose and highlights where custom schemas can provide additional benefits. We’ll also show you how Ansible’s core functionality can be extended to take full advantage of LDAP as a data store for inventories, variables, and data lookups.

The structure of LDAP data suggests using LDAP for hierarchical variable lookups. We evaluate how LDAP can be used in a way that resembles the first-found mechanism in tools like e.g. Jerakia.