A while ago I blogged about executing a reboot using Ansible on Debian-based operating systems. That is necessary after certain updates, as example after installing a new kernel. Turns out that things are very easy on Debian, compared to Red Hat based systems (Red Hat and CentOS in my case).
First of all, there is no clear indicator if a reboot is required. People work around this problem by creating overly complicated scripts. The needs-restarting tool in newer versions provides the -r option to indicate if a reboot is required. But the CentOS 7 I’ve just installed does not come with this version.