I've been reading through the vars precedence within Ansible and I'm not sure if the behavior I'm getting is by design or not. Here is my Ansible inventory;
---
all:
children:
we:
children:
workers:
hosts:
worker-we-vm1:
order: 1
worker-ew-vm2:
order: 2
vars:
size: "Standard_B2s"
controllers:
hosts:
controller-we-vm:
order: 1
vars:
size: "Standard_B1s"
vars:
ip_prefix: "10.60"
scus:
children:
workers:
hosts:
worker-scus-vm1:
order: 1
worker-scus-vm2:
order: 2
vars:
size: "Standard_B2s"
vars:
ip_prefix: "10.61"
vars:
azure_profile: "test"
Now what I'd expect is that the we VMs (e.g. worker-we-vm1) would have ip_prefix set to 10.60 and the scus VMs (e.g. worker-scus-vm1) would have ip_prefix set to 10.61 when accessing hostvars. But they're not, all of the VMs have ip_prefix set to 10.60.
Can anyone please help with understanding why the vars precedence isn't working as expected? I've read https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_variables.html and it seems to contradict itself on how parent and same-level variables are handled.
Ansible host group namespace is flat, not hierarchical, so there is only a single workers group in your example.
As you define the same variable for that group twice, only the last value is preserved.
Split your workers group, for example, to workers_we and workers_scus (and use host patterns if that was the reason for the definition).