Ansible
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Introducing Ansible

Ansible is a radically simple deployment, model-driven configuration management, and command execution framework. Other tools in this space have been too complicated for too long, require too much bootstrapping, and have too much learning curve. Ansible is dead simple and painless to extend. For comparison, Puppet and Chef have about 60k lines of code. Ansible’s core is a little over 1000 lines.

Ansible isn’t just for idempotent configuration – it’s also great for ad-hoc tasks, quickly firing off commands against nodes. See Command Line Examples. Where Ansible excels though, is expressing complex multi-node deployment processes, executing ordered sequences on different sets of nodes through Playbooks.

Extending ansible does not require programming in any particular language – you can write Ansible Modules as scripts or programs that return simple JSON. It’s also trivially easy to just execute useful shell commands.

Why use Ansible versus something else? (Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, etc?) Ansible will have far less code, it will be (by extension) more correct, and it will be the easiest thing to hack on and use you’ll ever see – regardless of your favorite language of choice.

Systems management doesn’t have to be complicated. Ansible’s docs will remain short & simple, and the source will be blindingly obvious.

Architecture

"Architecture Diagram"

Features

  • Dead simple setup
  • Super fast & parallel by default
  • No server or client daemons; use existing SSHd out of the box
  • No additional software required on client boxes
  • Can be easily run from a checkout, no installation required
  • Modules are idempotent, but you can also easily use shell commands
  • Modules can be written in ANY language
  • Awesome API for creating very powerful distributed scripts
  • Does not have to run remote steps as root
  • Pluggable transports (SSH is just the default)
  • Source host info & variables from files or external software
  • The easiest config management system to use, ever.

Resources

Your ideas and contributions are welcome. We’re also happy to help you with questions about Ansible.

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Contents

About the Author

Ansible was originally developed by Michael DeHaan (@laserllama), a Raleigh, NC based software developer and architect. He created the popular DevOps program Cobbler. Cobbler is used to deploy mission critical systems all over the planet, in industries ranging from massively multiplayer gaming, core internet infrastructure, finance, chip design, and more. Michael also helped co-author Func, a precursor to Ansible, which is used to orchestrate systems in lots of diverse places. He’s worked on systems software for IBM, Motorola, Red Hat’s Emerging Technologies Group, Puppet Labs, and rPath. Reach Michael by email here.