Cup of Joe with Jon and James

Cup of Joe with Jon and James

Two of Ansible’s very own Solutions architects, James Martin and Jonathan Davilla, will be hanging out at various coffee shops in the Washington, DC metro region in the upcoming weeks.   Stop by during your lunch hour and ask them about automation, DevOps culture, Ansible, and the difference between a latte and a machiatto.  Follow them on twitter for last minute updates @grepless and @defionscode.

3/13 , 11am-2pm   -  Swing’s Coffee 1702 G Street NW

3/27, 11am-2pm  - Chinatown Coffee 475 H St. NW

AnsibleFest New York City SUPER Early Bird Tickets Now Available

We are excited to announce that the next AnsibleFest will be held in New York City!

We are still working out the details, but we wanted to make some tickets available at a huge discount. AnsibleFest NYC is currently being planned for early June and will be at a great venue in New York City. If you are flexible and can plan ahead as well as make changes to your schedule, these tickets are for you!

The SUPER Early Bird price is just $179 (over 30% off the standard price) and is only available until March 23, 2015.

Purchase Super Early Bird AnsibleFest tickets here

We'll be announcing the exact date and location soon!

AnsibleFest NYC 2015

We are in the planning stages of our next stop in the AnsibleFest 2015 tour. We had a our biggest turnout ever at AnsibleFest London and know that our New York event will be even bigger and better!

AnsibleFest NYC is currently scheduled for late May/early June in NYC.

Details are being finalized now and tickets will go on sale soon.

If you are interested in speaking please email [email protected]

If you are interested in sponsoring please email [email protected] 

Interview with Ansible CEO

Ansible CEO Saïd Ziouani recently sat down for an interview with Adrian Bridgwater of ToolsAdvisor.net to talk about the past, present and future of Ansible. 

Tools Advisor: Ansible Tower is an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation by virtue of its role-based access control and dashboard functionality being core extras over and above the command line version of the open source product. Just exactly how 'non-technical' a user do you think should be involved here?

Saïd Ziouani: We strongly believe that IT Automation should be a dull task; your IP competency should be your priority and the main focus for your software developers. Managing your infrastructure must be simple to a point that it's almost boring. Tower takes the simplicity model of Ansible to a new level, allowing easy push button automation at scale, and team role delegation.

Read the full interview here.

AnsibleFest London Recaps

We posted our recap of AnsibleFest last week which has all of the links to the presentations, but we also wanted to provide you with a few recaps by AnsibleFest attendees.

elsaticsearch: Highlights from configuration management camp & Ansiblefest London

DevOpsGuys: #ANSIBLEFEST2015

Silpion: #ANSIBLEFEST London 2015

AnsibleFest London Presentations

We had our biggest and best AnsibleFest last week in London! This was our 1st Ansible event outside of the United States and due to the amazing turnout and great crowd we will definitely include at least one stop overseas in 2016.

If you were not able to attend, or just wanted to see the presentations, we’ve compiled all of them here:

How to automate Big Data with Ansible - Marius Boeru, BigStep

Ansible and Vagrant - Sebastian Göttschkes, wogibtswas.at

The Devs Are Opsing (And It Isn’t Painful) - Ali Asad Lotia, Blue Newt

Ansible, Windows, and Powershell - Jon Hawkesworth, M Modal

How Rackspace Is Deploying OpenStack With Ansible - Walter Bentley, Rackspace

What's New in V2 - James Cammarata, Ansible

Ansible Internals - Brian Coca, Ansible


We’ll be announcing the next stop in the AnsibleFest tour soon (hint: It is New York City) so follow us on Twitter to find out all of the details first!

View our Ansible Tower Video here to learn all about the great features available in Ansible Tower.

Using ansible and dynamic Amazon EC2 inventory management on #AWS

Brandon Chavis, an AWS Partner Solutions Architect, has a great post over on the AWS blog titled "Getting Started with Ansible and Dynamic Amazon EC2 Inventory Management" today.

From the post:

Today, the options for configuration and orchestration management seem nearly endless, making it daunting to find a tool that works well for you and your organization. Here at AWS, we think Ansible, an APN Technology Partner, provides a good option for configuration management due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and ability to interact easily with your ever-changing, scaling, and dynamic AWS architecture.

Instead of having to push an agent to every new instance you launch via userdata, roll an agent into an AMI, or engage in similarly management-intensive deployments of your config management software, the Ansible framework allows administrators to run commands against Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances as soon as they are available, all over SSH. This document intends to examine ways that your Amazon EC2 inventory can be managed with minimal effort, despite your constantly changing fleet of instances.

Read the full post here.

Ansible Adds Over 300 Customers in 2014

2014 was a great year for Ansible.

Ansible Highlights from 2014

• Named SD Times #1 Company to Watch in 2015 and a Top 10 open source project in 2014 by Red Hat’s opensource.com.

• The Ansible open source project has had over one million downloads in 2014.

• O’Reilly released the preview of its first Ansible book (available on Ansible.com) with the full book due out in early 2015.

• There are over 40 regular worldwide Ansible meetups, with new meetups popping up weekly around the world from Sydney to South Africa.

• Over 600 people attended AnsibleFests in San Francisco, Austin & New York in 2014, and 400 people are expected at the first AnsibleFest London in February 2015.

• Ansible Tower - Ansible’s enterprise IT automation solution - has been downloaded over 5,000 times and by 27 of the Fortune 100.

• Ansible Tower is in production managing tens of thousands of servers, VMs and cloud instances across enterprise verticals that include financial services, government, high-tech manufacturing, education, web & e-commerce and media.

• Ansible released three major upgrades of Ansible Tower in 2014, most recently adding capabilities for delivering self-service IT and HA for enterprise IT organizations.

• Ansible released agentless support for Continue reading

ComputerWeekly: Ansible’s secret agentless route to IT automation

ComputerWeekly recently posted a great breakdown of Ansible's role in IT automation.

Ansible Inc (upper case) is a company that makes "agentless" orchestration and configuration management tools in the form of an automation engine designed to help deploy both applications and the wider software systems that they exist within.

The core technology proposition here is a developer play yes -- but it's also an opportunity for less technical users to get involved with IT automation because Ansible avoids the need to write custom scripts or code to manage applications.

Read the full atricle on ComputerWeekly

Interact with Ansible

Find Ansible on all of your favorite social networks and on the web.

Twitter

Facebook

Github

Ansible Meetups

LinkedIn (Group)

LinkedIn (Page)

Google+

Ansible Project Google Group

Case Study: Cogapp

Our latest Ansible Case study features Cogapp, who helps the BBC, MoMA, and others organize their digital media, use Ansible for environment provisioning and content deployment. 

We use Ansible to build out the servers for deployments and to provision development VMs for our team. We also use Ansible to populate sample content for our development environments.

Upcoming Ansible Training Classes

We are pleased to announce to training courses. These courses are taught by members of the Ansible Team and will give a great look at how to get started using Ansible.

In this course, students will explore the origins of Ansible, how Ansible approaches automation, and the common use cases for Ansible. Students will learn about key Ansible concepts, including playbooks, plays, tasks, and modules, and the course will go through step-by-step creation of a playbook to deploy a full application from beginning to end. 

The cost is $199.

Greg DeKoenigsberg’s Blog: A Good Year for Ansible

Ansible's VP of Community, Greg DeKoenigsberg, compiled a nice statistical look back at our 2014. 

Here is a nice example of Ansible's growth on GitHub:

Read the full post on Greg's blog.

GigaOm: NASA Uses Ansible to launch web infrastructure into the cloud

GigaOm published a great article on how NASA launches their web infrastructure into the cloud today. The article features our own Jonathan Davila.

To help with the nitty gritty details of transferring those applications to AWS and setting up new servers, NASA used the Ansible configuration-management tool, said Davila. When InfoZen came, the apps were stored in a co-located data center where they weren’t being managed well, he explained, and many server operating systems weren’t being updated, leaving them vulnerable to security threats.

Without the configuration-management tool, Davila said that it would “probably take us a few days to patch every server in the environment” using shell scripts. Now, the team can “can patch all Linux servers in, like, 15 minutes.”

Read the full article on GigaOm.

Read our case study on How NASA Uses Ansible Tower.

Brian Coca: Ansible for Enterprise

Our own Brian Coca presented at the recent OpenStack for Enterprises NYC Meetup and talked about how large companies are using Ansible and Ansible Tower.

Check out his presentation below.

More information on Ansible Tower or Ansible Services.
Download a free preview copy of Ansible: Up & Running

Ansible Automation on AWS: Webinar Recording

We were proud to have DualSpark join us for a great webinar this week on automation on AWS using Ansible. Presenting from Ansible was Dave Johnson and Patrick McClory handled the discussion from the DualSpark side. 

Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts

Ansible Named a Top 10 Open Source Project by OpenSource.com

We are pleased to announce that Ansible has been named a Top 10 Open Source Project for 2014 by Opensource.com. Be sure to watch Michael DeHaan's presentation on why your IT infrastructure should be boring, read his interview with Opensource.com's Jen Krieger and learn about one of his favorite Star Trek quotes.

View the full list here.

Ansible’s Mark Phillips at DOXLON

Ansible's Mark Phillips recently presented at DOXLON in London.

 The Presentation:

The Video:

Follow DOXLON on Twitter and join the Meetup here.

Ansible Makes Work Easier

Michael DeHaan, the founder of Ansible, gave a lightning talk at the Opensource.com event prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. He talks about how Ansible can make work easier, less stressful and more efficient.

Watch the video:

See the full post at OpenSource.com

Ansible on AWS: Free Best Practices Webinar on December 17th!

We'd like to invite you to a free webinar on December 17th featuring Ansible and our friends at DualSpark, an expert Amazon Web Services consulting partner.

Register for the Webinar Here

Ansible Automation on AWS: Best Practices by Battle-Hardened Experts