Jeff Geerling - Ansible for DevOps: Server and configuration management for humans

Over the last few years, Ansible has rapidly become one of the most popular IT automation tools in the world. Weve seen the open source community expand from the beginning of the project in early 2012 to over 1200 individual contributors today. Ansibles modular architecture and broad applicability to a variety of automation and orchestration problems created a perfect storm for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.

Ansible is a general purpose IT automation platform, and it can be used for a variety of purposes. From configuration management: enforcing declared state across your infrastructure, to procedural application deployment, to broad multi-component and multi-system orchestration of complicated interconnected systems. It is agentless, so it can coexist with legacy tools, and its easy to install, configure, and maintain.

Ansible had its beginnings in 2012, when Michael DeHaan, the projects founder, took inspiration from several tools he had written prior, along with some hands-on experience with the state of configuration management at the time, and launched the project in February of 2012. Some of Ansibles unique attributes like its module-based architecture and agentless approach quickly attracted attention in the open source world.

In 2013, Said Ziouani, Michael DeHaan, and I launched Ansible, Inc. We wanted to harness the growing adoption of Ansible in the open source world, and create products to fill the gaps in the IT automation space as we saw them. The existing tools were complicated, error-prone, and hard to learn. Ansible gave users across an IT organization a low barrier of entry into automation, and it could be deployed incrementally, solving as few or as many problems as the team needed without a big shift in methodology.

This book is about using Ansible in a DevOps environment. Im not going to try to define what DevOps is or isnt, or whos doing it or not. My personal interpretation of the idea is that DevOps is meant to shorten the distance between the developers writing the code, and the operators running the application. Now, I dont believe adding a new DevOps team in between existing development and operations teams achieves that objective! (Oops, now Im trying for a definition, arent I?)

Well, definitions aside, one of the first steps towards a DevOps environment is choosing tools that can be consumed by both developers and operations engineers. Ansible is one of those tools: you dont have to be a software developer to use it, and the playbooks that you write can easily be self-documenting. There have been a lot of attempts at write once, run anywhere models of application development and deployment, but I think Ansible comes the closest to providing a common language thats useful across teams and across clouds and different datacenters.

The author of this book, Jeff, has been a long-time supporter, contributor, and advocate of Ansible, and hes maintained a massive collection of impressive Ansible roles in Galaxy, the public role-sharing service maintained by Ansible, Inc. Jeff has used Ansible extensively in his professional career, and is eminently qualified to write the end-to-end book on Ansible in a DevOps environment.

As you read this book, I hope you enjoy your journey into IT automation as much as we have. Be well, do good work, and automate everything.

Tim GerlaAnsible, Inc. Co-Founder & CTO