Have spent the past few months heavily working with Ansible and would totally recommend it for anyone wanting simple configuration management and orchestration. The barrier to entry is extremely low, because it uses ssh and there are no remote agents, so you can get going pretty quickly. I have an introductory screencast on in @ <a href="https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansible-part-1-4" rel="nofollow">https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansibl...</a>
Love Ansible for its simplicity. For some reason it "just clicked" whereas I really struggled with Puppet / Chef / or old-school shell scripts. (That says more about me than Puppet and Chef)<p>For me, YAML files and fantastic documentation made more sense than the DSLs of the other two.<p>Currently we use it to setup our 12-factor app in production, staging, and development environments. (Django, Elasticsearch on Ubuntu)
I'm really happy they now support "svc", part of D. J. Bernstein DaemonTools [1]. This one really is a killer feature, I'm excited to use.<p>I'm far closer than ever to not use ssh on my server manually.<p>1 : <a href="http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html" rel="nofollow">http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html</a>
Started using Ansible last year, I use it to create up to date base images for AWS autoscale groups and to quick set up personal development environments for other developers, and have playbooks for creating all my security groups so I can version control them. Highly recommended. I tried other tools but by far and away Ansible was the easiest to learn and use with no loss of functionality.
One of the changes hinted at here is that you can now specify that a task will always run using the 'always' tag - handy for things like ec2_facts which was a long requested feature (<a href="https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3157" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ansible/ansible/issues/3157</a>)
Ansible is really great, but for reasons some people might not think about.<p>Ansible has support for powershell, which is essentially now the backend of windows. (your new servers are gui-less right?) Powershell is also not a bad language at all, and while for those of us that are bash/zsh/fish natives, it will take some getting used to, I find it a really powerfull and more intuitive way to interact with windows, even if it is <i>very overly majorly verbose-verbose</i>.<p>Being able to work in my very mixed environment (Solaris/OSX/Linux/Doze, etc) via a central ansible server group is awesome.
I've learned with Ansible never to be quick to update. There's always something that will break. I've been on 1.7.2 for a while, and will probably think about updating later this year.
Do they have any plans to support python3? I want to use it on Arch and Ubuntu. FAQ says they will address this issue by python3 becomes mainstream, but what does the mainstream exactly mean? When RHEL set python3 as default? Python2 maintenance continues until 2020, so seems have to wait for more several years.
1.9.0 includes convenient new gluster_volume and haproxy modules (among others) and will also update its DigitalOcean integration to use the v2 API shortly (in 1.9.1 - it's currently using the more annoying v1 API).<p>If you want to use the latest and greatest, it's easy enough to set up Ansible from source. Otherwise, use brew, apt, yum, or pip (they're all up to date).<p>P.S. 1.9.0 was released on Mar. 25th, I think there's an older thread on it somewhere around here.
Nice maintenance release with a few improvements. I'd say the core of Ansible's brainpower is focused on v2 which will have significant changes (easily available today if you want to try, check the v2 dir).
A comparison of notable free and open source configuration management software: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_configuration_management_software" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_confi...</a>