[Howto] First Steps With Ansible

System/Configuration management is a hot topic right now. At Fosdem2014 there was an entire track dedicated to the topic – and the rooms where constantly overcrowded. There are more and more large server installations out there these days. With virtualization, it again get sensible and possible to have one server for each service. All these often rather similar machines need to be managed and thus central configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef became very popular. They keep all configuration stored in recipes on a central server, and the clients connect to it and pull the recipes regularly to ensure if everything is fine.