Ansible is a radically simple deployment, configuration, 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 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 complex sequences of commands on different hosts 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, Fabric, Capistrano, mCollective, Func, SaltStack, 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.
Your ideas and contributions are welcome. We’re also happy to help you with questions about Ansible.
Ansible was originally developed by Michael DeHaan (@laserllama), a Raleigh, NC based software developer and architect. He created other popular DevOps programs such as Cobbler, the popular Linux install server. 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 of 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.