Quo Vadis, Ansible?

It's difficult to believe that another five years have passed since Red Hat bought Ansible, especially because, so far, Red Hat hasn't changed Ansible as much as you might have expected or predicted on the basis of other Red Hat purchases. In some places, it is noticeable that Red Hat goals are dominating the to-do list for the automator, but all in all, it seems as if its developers are still largely free to do as they please.

Accordingly, the Ansible team has also maintained its modus operandi of limiting feature planning to the period between two major releases. The current major release of Ansible at the time of going to press was 2.10, but by the time this issue is published, version 3.0 will have probably seen the light of day. In this respect, there is no vision for Ansible development within the coming years. Instead, the developers of the automation solution are happy to respond to feature requests either directly from Red Hat or from the ranks of users.

The only thing that can be predicted with some certainty for Ansible is that Red Hat will continue to view and treat it as an important asset in the context of its own products. For Ansible fans, this means that, for now, you should not expect too much in the way of profound changes in the design of the software or in the way Ansible development proceeds.

Conclusions

Ansible does not try to impress admins with a huge feature set, fancy technology, or daring features with great automation. Instead, the tool sees itself first and foremost as an honest automator: If you come from a world of Bash and shell scripts, you will find it easy to get started. That Ansible roles almost inevitably self-document makes working with the tool even easier.

The software scores other bonus points: It has a number of integrations with external tools, the inventory can be maintained as a text file or generated dynamically, and extending Ansible doesn't present problems for admins. Even less experienced admins can use Ansible to introduce automation into their environments in no time at all. Ansible is therefore recommended to anyone looking for a jumping-off point into the world of automation or simply anyone who prefers an automator without all the bells and whistles.

The Author

Martin Gerhard Loschwitz is Cloud Platform Architect at Drei Austria and works on topics such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph.