how to re-use a role in a single playbook?

[Karl Auer]

I have a very simple role called "make_vpc" that creates an EC2 VPC. It takes as inputs three variables: region, vpc_name and vpc_cidr_block.

In my playbook I can just set those variables, call the role, and I get a VPC. It's great!

---
- hosts: localhost

  vars:
     region: ap-southeast-2
     vpc_name: fred
     vpc_cidr_block: 10.100.100.0/24

  roles:
     - vpc

Now I want to create a playbook that makes two VPCs, with different names. I want to re-use my role.

How do I do that? How do I provide two sets of variables?

The only way I can think of is to use include_vars inside the role, with the path being based on some variable I set when calling the role.

So in the role I would have:

- include_vars:
    file: vars/{{vpc_name}}.yaml

I would make sure that these two files, with appropriate contents, existed:

/path/to/playbook/vars/fred.yaml
/path/to/playbook/vars/mary.yaml

Then in the playbook I would have:

   roles:
      - { role: vpc, vpc_name: fred }
      - [ role: vpc, vpc_name:mary}

Is that a good way to do it? Is there a better way?

Regards, K.