[INTPenis]

I think what makes a product like ansible catch on is its use of a simple scripting language like python. This makes project participation more accessible.

Ordinary sysadmins can write their own ansible modules with ease. It's possible that cfengine has that now but ask sendmail about repairing an old reputation.

[dsmithatx]

Actually I think it's more the YAML config files than the fact it's written in Python. I learned 80% of Ansible in probably 10 days of writing playbooks and going through the infrastructure at my new job.

Also I used to work with Puppet in an 8000 server environment and Ansible and Salt both are so much more fun and easy to use than Puppet. I hear the same thing over Chef too.

Last Ansible is the only one that doesn't require any agents installed and does everything via SSH. At first I didn't think I'd like that coming from Puppet but, I can do everything I need to without another daemon to worry about.

[INTPenis]

I also came from operating one puppet environment to using ansible, and just like you the major sales points were ease of configuration with YAML and agentless deployment.

But development of the project has been fueled by skyrocketing participation. Myself and a friend of mine have both contributed small bits of code to the project without being professional developers, and looking at the github contributors they are in the thousands for a 3 year old project. Compare that to cfengine's 73 contributors.

[Florin_Andrei]

My thoughts exactly on all points except the last one.

It's definitely good to not be forced to use agents everywhere + a dedicated "mothership" instance, but sometimes I do wish I had Ansible agents on my instances, just so I could "git push" the whole thing and forget about it.

Looking forward to Red Hat following on their good old habits and open-sourcing Tower.

[dsmithatx]

Well to be fair I use Codeship with Tower to do auto-deployments so, if I "git push" to dev I'm done.