~ / sysadmin / ansible slides

Introducing Ansible, the slide deck

The slides from the free software day, one after another. Read them as a page, no keyboard needed. The full write up lives with the talk itself.

1. Who is talking. A systems and network engineer, mostly Unix, with a soft spot for small hardware and Perl.
2. Configuration management in one line. Describe the state you want, apply it, and keep a record.
3. Nothing here is new. There are older tools, and each has its own strengths and its own machinery.
4. The small newcomer. Aimed at being simple: SSH instead of agents, YAML instead of a bespoke language.
5. Push versus pull. A push run tells you right away whether the step worked, which suits a small team.
6. The inventory. Hosts, groups, and variables attached to either.
7. Ad hoc commands. One module, one group, one answer.
8. Playbooks. An ordered list of tasks with handlers for the things that should react to change.
9. A worked example. A baseline role reused across machines, plus a monitoring template.
10. Extending it. Modules can be written in any language that runs on the target host.
11. Community. Documentation, source code and a busy mailing list.
12. Try it. The best way to judge a configuration tool is to point it at one spare machine.

Back to the talk write up, or read the official documentation.