Thoughts on Restructuring the Ansible Project
Ansible became popular largely because we adopted some key principles early, and stuck to them.
The first key principle was simplicity: simple to install, simple to use, simple to find documentation and examples, simple to write playbooks, and simple to make contributions.The second key principle was modularity: Ansible functionality could be easily extended by writing modules, and anyone could write a module and contribute it back to Ansible.
The third key principle was “batteries included”: all of the modules for Ansible would be built-in, so you wouldn’t have to figure out where to get them. They’d just be there.
We’ve come a long way by following these principles, and we intend to stick to them.
Recently though, we’ve been reevaluating how we might better structure Ansible to support these principles. We now find ourselves dealing with problems of scale that are becoming more challenging to solve. Jan-Piet Mens, who has continued to be a close friend to Ansible since our very earliest days, recently described those problems quite succinctly from his perspective as a long-time contributor -- and I think his analysis of the problems we face is quite accurate. Simply, we’ve become victims of our own success.
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