Playbooks that needs to be tweaked depending on the targeted environment - ansible

Question

In our company we're using ansible to target different environments, about 10 on the development and integration side, and 3 on the production side. Those environments have some differences in terms of the number of resources dedicated. For example let say in production we have a standalone server or vm dedicated to run the jvm, another one for dB... And in certain other environments those applications share the same server or vm. The problem is that some playbooks needs to be tweaked in order to target such an environment, so how could we do to make it as generic and transparent as possible?
Thanks for your advices

Answer 1

what you want to achieve is putting good hosts in good groups.
if you're familiar with ansible-inventory --graph, here is what you want to achieve:
#all:
|--#dev:
| |--devel1.domain.org
| |--devel2.domain.org
|--#db:
| |--db1.domain.org
| |--db2.domain.org
| |--dbprod1.domain.org
| |--appprod2.domain.org
|--#app:
| |--app1.domain.org
| |--app2.domain.org
| |--appprod1.domain.org
| |--appprod2.domain.org
|--#dev1:
| |--devel1.domain.org
| |--db1.domain.org
| |--app1.domain.org
|--#dev2:
| |--devel2.domain.org
| |--db2.domain.org
| |--app2.domain.org
|--#prod:
| |--#prod1:
| | |--dbprod1.domain.org
| | |--appprod1.domain.org
| |--#prod2:
| | |--appprod2.domain.org
here the host appprod2.domain.org will inherit from group_vars of app,db, prod,prod2