After brief visits with Puppet and Chef for config management,I’ve set my sights on Ansible. It’s late and I’ve been staring at this stuff for way too long today, but here are some early observations:

• I really like that it is written in Python. Puppet and Chef are great pieces of software, but I spend my days staring at Python. It’s nice not having to context switch away.
• The documentation, while organized somewhat weirdly, is surprisingly thorough and helpful. I found myself much less frustrated and overwhelmed in comparison to my forays into Puppet and Chef.
• It’s just SSH.
• The playbook organization and format make a lot of sense to me. It feels a whole lot less complex than Chef in particular.

As far as negatives:

• The documentation is very good but it could use some organizational tweaking. The related links at the bottom of some of the pages are very erratic and sometimes incomplete.
• If you’re wanting to use Ansible as a Python API, the docs for this are pretty incomplete.

So far, Ansible looks very promising. I think this is going to be a great fit for us at Pathwright. Perhaps we’ll even have some time to contribute improved docs.