We now deploy software applications by stringing together services that run on a distributed set of computing resources and communicate over different networking protocols. 

You can wire up these services by hand: spinning up the servers you need, SSHing to each one, installing packages, editing config files, and so forth, but it’s a pain. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and just plain dull to do this kind of work manually, especially around the third or fourth time. And for more complex tasks, like standing up an OpenStack cloud inside your application, doing it by hand is madness. 

There’s a better way. 

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy - and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

Here are some tips for making the most of Ansible and Ansible playbooks.

You can find some example playbooks illustrating these best practices in our ansible-examples repository. (NOTE: These may not use all of the features in the latest release, but are still an excellent reference!).

Among the many configuration management tools available, Ansible has some distinct advantages—it’s minimal in nature, you don’t need to install anything on your nodes, and it has an easy learning curve. This practical guide shows you how to be productive with this tool quickly, whether you’re a developer deploying code to production or a system administrator looking for a better automation solution.

Vagrant greatly simplifies the use of Virtual Machines to spawn development environments in no time. This article shows how to quickly get up and running with Vagrant, to create and use local Virtual Machines as development environments, all with a single command. 

Ansible role that installs the Shadowsocks secure SOCKS 5 proxy (http://shadowsocks.org). A random password is automatically chosen, and a QR code is generated that makes it easy to configure the iOS and Android clients.

This talk will cover the topics listed below:

• General info about configuration management and benefits of using configuration management tools
• Ansible overview and advantages of Ansible comparing to other configuration management tools
• Basics of Ansible such as roles, tasks, handlers, modules, playbooks etc
• Info about Ansible PostgreSQL module and its usage with examples
• A playbook example using PostgreSQL module, it might cover managing Postgres DBs on AWS systems

This page provides a basic overview of correct YAML syntax, which is how Ansible playbooks (our configuration management language) are expressed.

We use YAML because it is easier for humans to read and write than other common data formats like XML or JSON. Further, there are libraries available in most programming languages for working with YAML.

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