Ansible works against multiple managed nodes or "hosts" in your infrastructure at the same time, using a list or group of lists know as inventory. Once your inventory is defined, you use :ref:`patterns <intro_patterns>` to select the hosts or groups you want Ansible to run against.
Ansible works against multiple managed nodes or "hosts" in your infrastructure at the same time, using a list or group of lists known as inventory. Once your inventory is defined, you use :ref:`patterns <intro_patterns>` to select the hosts or groups you want Ansible to run against.
The default location for inventory is a file called ``/etc/ansible/hosts``. You can specify a different inventory file at the command line using the ``-i <path>`` option. You can also use multiple inventory files at the same time, and/or pull inventory from dynamic or cloud sources or different formats (YAML, ini, etc), as described in :ref:`intro_dynamic_inventory`.
Introduced in version 2.4, Ansible has :ref:`inventory_plugins` to make this flexible and customizable.