Lorin Hochstein - Ansible: Up and Running

by Lorin Hochstein

Copyright 2015 Lorin Hochstein. All rights reserved.

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978-1-491-91532-5

[LSI]

Ansible started as a simple side project in February of 2012, and its rapidgrowth has been a pleasant surprise. It is now the work product of about athousand people (and the ideas of many more than that), and it is widely deployed inalmost every country. Its not unusual in a computer meet-up to find a handful(at least) of people who use it.

Ansible is perhaps exciting because it really isnt. Ansible doesnt reallyattempt to break new ground, but rather to distill a lot of existing ideas that othersmart folks had already figured out and make them a bit more accessible.

Ansible sought a middle ground between somewhat computer-sciencey ITautomation approaches (themselves a reaction to tedious large commercialsuites) and hack-and-slash scripting that just got things done. Also, how canwe replace a configuration management system, a deployment project, anorchestration project, and our library of arbitrary but important shell scriptswith a single system? That was the idea.

Could we remove major architectural components from the IT automation stack?Eliminating management demons and relying instead on OpenSSH meant thesystem could start managing a computer fleet immediately, without having to setup anything on the managed machines. Further, the system was apt to be morereliable and secure.

I had noticed that in trying to automate systems previously, things that shouldbe simple were often hard, and that writing automation content could oftencreate a time-sucking force that kept me from things I wanted to spend more timedoing. And I didnt want the system to take months to become an expertwith, either.

In particular, I personally enjoy writing new software, but piloting automationsystems, a bit less. In short, I wanted to make automation quicker and leaveme more time for the things I cared about. Ansible was not something you weremeant to use all day long, but to get in, get out, and get back to doing thethings you cared about.

I hope you will like Ansible for many of the same reasons.

Although I spent a large amount of time making sure Ansibles docs werecomprehensive, theres always a strong advantage to seeing material presented ina variety of ways, and often in seeing actual practice applied alongside thereference material.

In Ansible: Up And Running, Lorin presents Ansible in a very idiomatic way, inexactly the right order in which you might wish to explore it. Lorin has beenaround Ansible since almost the very beginning, and Im very grateful for hiscontributions and input.

Im also immensely thankful for everyone who has been a part of this project todate, and everyone who will be in the future.

Enjoy the book, and enjoy managing your computer fleet! And remember to installcowsay!

Michael DeHaan

Creator of Ansible (software), former CTO of Ansible, Inc. (company)

April 2015