The email sent will contain a link to this article, the article title, and an article excerpt (if available). For security reasons, your IP address will also be included in the sent email.
This is guest post by Michael DeHaan (@laserllama), a software developer and architect, on Ansible, a simple deployment, model-driven configuration management, and command execution framework.
I owe High Scalability a great deal of credit for the idea behind my latest software project. I was reading about how an older tool I helped create, Func, was used at Tumblr, and it kicked some ideas into gear. This article is about what happened from that idea.
My observation, which the article reinforced, was that many shops end up using a configuration management tool (Puppet, Chef, cfengine), a separate deployment tool (Capistrano, Fabric) and yet another separate ad-hoc task execution tool (Func, pssh, etc) because one class of tool historically hasn't been good at all three jobs.
My other observation (not from the article) was that the whole "infrastructure as code" movement, while revolutionary, and definitely great for many, was probably secretly grating on a good number of systems administrators. As a software developer, I myself can emphasize -- the software design/development/testing process is frequently painful, and I would rather think of infrastructure as being data-driven. Data is supposed to be simple, programs are often not. This is why I made Ansible.
Ansible: How is it Different?
Return to Article