1. Configuration management finally done right

2. The story so far: Puppet
●slow
●pull-based (dedicated client)
●custom PKI
●huge memory hog, very brittle
●extendable in Ruby only
●hard to share data between nodes
●crazy DSL
●slow

3. The story so far: bcfg2
●acceptable performance
●pull-based (dedicated client)
●custom PKI
●small memory footprint
●extendable in Python
●XML everywhere

4. The future is now: ansible
●no daemons, ever (almost)
●push-based (python is the client)
●ssh keys for authentication
●quite fast and getting faster
●extendable in everything that can write JSON
●fast and furious (<1 year old)

5. Deploying ansible
1. pip install ansible
2. profit!
(almost, some tweaks needed)

6. One-shot mode
ansible webservers -m copy -a
„src=httpd.conf
dest=/etc/apache2/httpd.conf”

7. /etc/ansible/hosts
[webservers]
www[0-100].example.com
[webservers:vars]
app_version=1.23.45
[dbservers]
db0.example.com
db1.example.com

8. Playbooks
●YAML
●collections of actions, mostly like one-shot mode
●notifications (restart apache if config changed)

9. Get shit done
From zero to production in minutes
●no custom authentication
●no client setup
●no daemons
●no external dependencies (DNS, NTP, WTF)
●playbooks very similar to ad-hoc mode
●configuration management or one-off deploys

10. http://ansible.cc/